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EGOISTS 

A BOOK OF SUPERMEN 



Redrawn by Edwin B. Child from a crayon portrait. 

Henry Beyle- Stendhal. 



EGOISTS 

A BOOK OF SUPERMEN 



STENDHAL, BAUDELAIRE, FLAUBERT, ANATOLE FRANCE, 

HUYSMANS, BARRES, NIETZSCHE, BLAKE, IBSEN, 

STIRNER, AND ERNEST HELLO 



BY 
JAMES a HUNEKER 



WITH PORTRAIT OF STENDHAL; UNPUBLISHED LETTER OF 
FLAUBERT; AND ORIGINAL PROOF PAGE OF MADAME BOVARY 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS 

1909 



COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY 
CHARLES SCRIBNER's SONS 



PM7LI 



Published March, 1909 




TO 
DR. GEORG BRANDES 



"Htb' ilk), toenn anHere Ieben ? "—Goethe 



The studies gathered here first appeared in Scribner's 
Magazine ', the Atlantic Monthly, the North American 
Review , the New York Times, and the New York Sun. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. A Sentimental Education: Henry Beyle- 
Stendhal i 

II. The Baudelaire Legend 66 

III. The Real Flaubert 104 

IV. Anatole France 139 

V. The Pessimists' Progress: J.-K. Huysmans 167 

VI. The Evolution of an Egoist: Maurice 

Barres 207 

VII. Phases of Nietzsche 236 

I. The Will to Suffer 236 

II. Nietzsche's Apostasy 247 

III. Antichrist? . . 256 

VIII. Mystics . . . . , 269 

I. Ernest Hello 269 

II. " Mad Naked Blake " 277 

III. Francis Poictevin 290 

IV. The Road to Damascus 297 

V. From an Ivory Tower 304 

IX. Ibsen . . . e 8 317 

X. Max Stirner , e 350 



I 

A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION 

HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

I 

The fanciful notion that psychical delicacy is 
accompanied by a corresponding physical ex- 
terior should have received a death-blow in the 
presence of Henry Beyle, better known as Sten- 
dhal. Chopin, Shelley, Byron and Cardinal New- 
man did not in personal appearance contradict 
their verse prose and music; but Stendhal, pos- 
sessing an exquisite sensibility, was, as Hec- 
tor Berlioz cruelly wrote in his Memoirs: "A 
little pot-bellied man with a spiteful smile, who 
tried to look grave." Sainte-Beuve is more ex- 
plicit. "Physically his figure, though not short, 
soon grew thick-set and heavy, his neck short and 
full-blooded. His fleshy face was framed in dark 
curly hair and whiskers, which before his death 
were assisted by art. His forehead was fine: the 
nose turned up, and somewhat Calmuck in shape. 
His lower lip, which projected a little, betrayed 
his tendency to scoff. His eyes were rather small 
but very bright, deeply set in their cavities, and 
pleasing when he smiled. His hands, of which 



EGOISTS 

he was proud, were small and daintily shaped. 
In the last years of his life he grew heavy and 
apoplectic. But he always took great pains to 
conceal the symptoms of physical decay even from 
his own friends.'' 

Henri Monnier, who caricatured him, ap- 
parently in a gross manner, denied that he had 
departed far from his model. Some one said that 
Stendhal looked like an apothecary — Homais, 
presumably, or M. Prudhomme. His maternal 
grandfather, Doctor Gagnon, assured him when 
a youth that he was ugly, but he consolingly added 
that no one would reproach him for his ugliness. 
The piercing and brilliant eye that like a mountain 
lake could be both still and stormy, his eloquent and 
ironical mouth, pugnacious bearing, Celtic pro- 
file, big shoulders, and well-modelled leg made 
an ensemble, if not alluring, at least striking. 
No man with a face capable of a hundred shades 
of expression can be ugly. Furthermore, Sten- 
dhal was a charming causeur, bold, copious, 
witty. With his conversation, he drolly remarked, 
he paid his way into society. And this demigod 
or monster, as he was alternately named by his 
admirers and enemies, could be the most im- 
passioned of lovers. His life long he was in love; 
Prosper Merimee declares he never encountered 
such furious devotion to love. It was his master 
passion. Not Napoleon, not his personal am- 
bitions, not even Italy, were such factors in Sten- 
dhal's life as his attachments. His career was 
a sentimental education. This ugly man with 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

the undistinguished features was a haughty cav- 
alier, an intellectual Don Juan, a tender, sigh- 
ing swain, a sensualist, and ever lyric where the 
feminine was concerned. But once seated, pen 
in hand, the wise, worldly cynic was again master. 
"My head is a magic-lantern," he said. And 
his literary style is on the surface as unattractive 
as were the features of the man; the inner ear for 
the rhythms and sonorities of prose was missing. 
That is the first paradox in the Beyle-Stendhal 
case. 

Few writers in the nineteenth century were 
more neglected; yet, what a chain of great critics 
his work begot. Commencing with Goethe in 
1818, who, after reading Rome, Naples, and 
Florence, wrote that the Frenchman attracted 
and repulsed him, interested and annoyed him, 
but it was impossible to separate himself from the 
book until its last page. What makes the opinion 
remarkable is that Goethe calmly noted Sten- 
dhal's plagiarism of his own Italian Journey. 
About 1 83 1 Goethe was given Le Rouge et le 
Noir and told Eckermann of its worth in warm 
terms. After Goethe another world-hero praised 
Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme: Balzac lit- 
erally exploded a bouquet of pyrotechnics, call- 
ing the novel a masterpiece of observation, and 
extolling the Waterloo picture. Sainte-Beuve was 
more cautious. He dubbed Stendhal a " ro- 
mantic hussar," and said that he was devoid of 
invention; a literary Uhlan, for men of letters, 
not for the public. Shortly after his sudden 

3 



EGOISTS 

death, M. Bussiere wrote in the Revue des Deux 
Monies of Stendhal's " clandestine celebrity." 
Taine's trumpet-call in 1857 proclaimed him 
as the great psychologue of his century. And 
later, in his English Literature, Taine wrote: "His 
talents and ideas were premature, his admirable 
divinations not understood. Under the exte- 
rior of a conversationalist and a man of the world 
Stendhal explained the most esoteric mechanisms 

— a scientist who noted, decomposed, deduced; 
he first marked the fundamental causes of nation- 
ality, climate, temperament; he was the naturalist 
who classified and weighed forces and taught us 
to open our eyes." Taine was deeply influenced 
by Stendhal; read carefully his Italian Pilgrimage, 
and afterward Thomas Graindorge. He so per- 
sistently preached Stendhalism — beylisme } as its 
author preferred to term his vagrant philosophy 

— that Sainte-Beuve reproved him. Melchior 
de Vogiie said that Stendhal's heart had been 
fabricated under the Directory and from the 
same wood as Barras and Talleyrand. Brune- 
tiere saw in him the perfect expression of ro- 
mantic and anti-social individualism. Caro spoke 
of his " serious blague," while Victor Hugo found 
him " somniferous." But Merimee, though openly 
disavowing discipleship, acknowledged privately 
the abiding impression made upon him by the 
companionship of Beyle. Much of Merimee is 
Stendhal better composed, better written. 

About 1880 Zola, searching a literary pedigree 
for his newly-born Naturalism, pitched upon 

4 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL p 

Stendhal to head the movement. The first Ro- 
mantic — he employed the term Romanticism be- 
fore the rest — the first literary Impressionist, the 
initiator of Individualism, Stendhal forged many 
formulas, was a matrix of genres, literary and 
psychologic. Paul Bourget's Essays in Contem- 
porary Psychology definitely placed Beyle in the 
niche he now occupies. This was in 1883. Since 
then the swelling chorus headed by Tolstoy, 
Georg Brandes, and the amiable fanatics who 
exhumed at Grenoble his posthumous work, have 
given to the study of Stendhal fresh life. We 
see how much Nietzsche owed to Stendhal; 
see in Dostoievsky's Raskolnilikow — Crime and 
Punishment — a Russian Julien Sorel; note that 
Bourget, from Le Disciple to Sensations d'lta- 
lie, is compounded of his forerunner, the dilet- 
tante and cosmopolitan who wrote Promenades 
dans Rome and Lamiel. What would Maurice 
Barres and his "culte du Moi" have been without 
Stendhal — who employed before him the famous 
phrase "deracination" ? Amiel, sick- willed think- 
er, did not alone invent: "A landscape is a state 
of soul"; Stendhal had spoken of a landscape 
not alone sufficing; it needs a moral or historic 
interest. Before Schopenhauer he described 
Beauty as a promise of happiness; and he in- 
vented the romance of the petty European Prin- 
cipality. Meredith followed him, as Robert 
Louis Stevenson in his Prince Otto patterned 
after Meredith. The painter-novelist Fromentin 
mellowed Stendhal's procedure; and dare we con- 

5 



EGOISTS 

ceive of Meredith or Henry James composing 
their work without having had a complete cog- 
nizance of Beyle-Stendhal ? The Egoist is beylisme 
of a superior artistry; while in America Henry B. 
Fuller shows sympathy for Beyle in his Chevalier 
Pensieri-Vani and its sequel. Surely the Prorege 
of Arcopia had read the Chartreuse. And with 
Edith Wharton the Stendhal touch is not absent. 
In England, after the dull essay by Hayward 
(prefixed to E. P. Robbings excellent translation 
of Chartreuse), Maurice Hewlett contributed an 
eloquent introduction to a new edition of the 
Chartreuse and calls him "a man cloaked in ice 
and fire.'' Anna Hampton Brewster was possibly 
the first American essayist to introduce to us Sten- 
dhal in her St. Martin's Summer. Saintsbury, 
Dowden, Benjamin Wells, Count Llitzow have 
since written of him; and in Germany the Sten- 
dhal cult is growing, thanks to Arthur Schurig, 
L. Spach, and Friedrick von Oppeln-Bronikowski. 
It has been mistaken criticism to range Beyle 
as only a "literary" man. He despised the pro- 
fession of literature, remarking that he wrote as 
one smokes a cigar. His diaries and letters, the 
testimony of his biographer, Colomb, and his 
friend Merimee, betray this pose — a greater 
poser and mystijicateur it would be difficult to 
find. He laboured like a slave over his material, 
and if he affected to take the Civil Code as his 
model of style it nettled him, nevertheless, when 
anyone decried his prose. His friend Jacque- 
mont spoke of his detestable style of a grocer; 

6 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

Balzac called him to account for his carelessness. 
Flattered, astounded, as was Stendhal by the 
panegyric of Balzac, his letter of thanks shows 
that the reproof cut deeply. He abused Chateau- 
briand, Madame de Stael, and George Sand for 
their highly coloured imagery and flowing manner. 
He even jeered at Balzac, saying that if he — Beyle 
— had written "It snows in my heart," or some 
such romantic figure, Balzac would then have 
praised his style. 

Thanks to the labours of Casimir Stryienski 
and his colleagues, we may study the different 
drafts Stendhal made of his novels. He seldom 
improved by recasting. The truth is that his dry, 
naked method of narration, despite its clumsi- 
ness, despite the absence of plan, is excellently 
adapted to the expression of his ideas. He is a 
psychologue. He deals with soul-stuff. An 
eighteenth-century man in his general ideas and 
feelings, he followed the seventeenth century and 
Montesquieu; he derives from Montaigne and 
Chamfort, and his philosophy is coloured by 
a study of Condillac, Hobbes, Helvetius, Cabanis, 
Destutt Tracy, and Machiavelli. He is a de- 
scendant of Diderot and the Encyclopaedists, a 
philosophe of the salons, a petit mcntre, a material- 
ist for whom nothing exists but his ideas and sen- 
sations. A French epicurean, his pendulum 
swings between love and war — the adoration of 
energy and the adoration of pleasure. What 
complicates his problem is the mixture of war- 
rior and psychologist. That the man who fol- 

7 



EGOISTS 

lowed Napoleon through several of his campaigns, 
serving successfully as a practical commissary 
and fighter, should have been an adorer of 
women, was less strange than that he should have 
proved to be the possessor of such vibrating sensi- 
bility. Jules Lemaitre sees him as "a grand 
man of action paralysed little by little because of 
his incomparable analysis.' ' Yet he never be- 
trayed unreadiness when confronted by peril. He 
read Voltaire and Plato during the burning of 
Moscow — which he described as a beautiful 
spectacle — and he never failed to present him- 
self before his kinsman and patron, Marshal 
Daru, with a clean-shaved face, even when the 
Grand Army was a mass of stragglers. 

" You are a man of heart," said Daru, French- 
man in that phrase. When Napoleon demanded 
five millions of francs from a German province, 
Stendhal — who adopted this pen-name from the 
archaeologist Winckelmann's birthplace, a Prus j 
sian town — raised seven millions and was in con- 
sequence execrated by the people. Napoleon 
asked on receiving the money the name of the 
agent, adding, "c'est Men !" We are constrained to 
believe Merimee's assertion that Stendhal was 
the soul of honour, and incapable of baseness, 
after this proof. At a time when plunder was 
the order of the day's doings, the poor young aide- 
de-camp could have pocketed with ease at least 
a million of the excess tax. He did not do this, 
nor did he, in his letters or memoirs, betray any 
remorse for his honesty. 

8 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

Sainte-Beuve said that Beyle was the dupe of 
his fear of being duped. This was confirmed by 
Merimee in the concise little study prefixed to 
the Correspondence. It is doubtful if these two 
men were drawn to each other save by a certain 
contemptuous way of viewing mankind. Sten- 
dhal was the more sentimental of the pair; he 
frequently reproached Merimee for his cold heart. 
He had also a greater sense of humour. That 
each distrusted the other is not to be denied. 
Augustin Filon, in his brochure on Merimee, said 
that "the influence exercised by Stendhal on 
Merimee during the decisive years in which his 
literary eclecticism was formed, was considerable, 
even more than Merimee himself was aware." 
But the author of Carmen was a much finer 
artist. The Danish critic, Georg Brandes, has 
described Beyle's relation to Balzac as "that 
of the reflective to the observant mind; of the 
thinker in art to the seer. We see into the hearts 
of Balzac's characters, into the ' dark-red mill of 
passion' which is the motive force of their action; 
Beyle's characters receive their impulse from the 
head, the 'open light-and-sound chamber'; the 
reason being that Beyle was a logician, and Balzac 
a man of an effusively rich animal nature. Beyle 
stands to Victor Hugo in much the same position 
as Leonardo da Vinci to Michaelangelo. Hugo's 
plastic imagination creates a supernaturally 
colossal and muscular humanity fixed in an eternal 
attitude of struggle and suffering; Beyle's myste- 
rious, complicated, refined intellect produces a 

9 



EGOISTS 

small series of male and female portraits, which 
exercise an almost magic fascination on us with 
their far-away, enigmatic expressions, and their 
sweet, wicked smile. Beyle is the metaphysician 
among the French authors of his day, as Leonardo 
was the metaphysician among the great painters 
of the Renaissance." 

According to Bourget, Beyle's advent into 
letters marked the " tragic dawn of pessimism." 
But is it precise to call him a pessimist? He 
was of too vigorous a temper, too healthy in body, 
to be classed with the decadents. His was the 
soul of a sixteenth-century Italian, one who had 
read and practised the cheerful scepticism of 
Montaigne. As he served bravely when a soldier, 
so, stout and subtle in after life, he waged war 
with the blue devils — his chief foe. Disease 
weakened his physique, weakened his mentality, 
yet he fought life to its dull end. He was pur- 
sued by the secret police, and this led him to all 
sorts of comical disguises and pseudonyms. And 
to the last he experienced a childish delight in the 
invention of odd names for himself. 

Felix Feneon, in speaking of Arthur Rimbaud, 
asserted that his work was, perhaps, "outside 
of literature." This, with some modification, may 
be said of Beyle. His stories are always interest- 
ing; they may ramble and halt, digress and wander 
into strange places; but the psychologic vision of 
the writer never weakens. His chief concern is 
the mind or soul of his characters. He hitches his 
kite to earth, yet there is the paper air-ship float- 

10 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

ing above you, lending a touch of the ideal to his 
most matter-of-fact tales. He uses both the 
microscope and scalpel. He writes, as has been 
too often said, indifferently; his formal sense is 
nearly nil; much of his art criticism mere gossip; 
he has little feeling for colour; yet he describes 
a soul and its manifold movements in precise 
terms, and while he is at furthest remove from 
symbolism, he often has an irritating spiritual 
suggestiveness. The analogue here to plastic 
art — he, the least plastic of writers — is unes- 
capable. Stendhal, whatever else he may be, 
is an incomparable etcher of character. His 
acid phrases "bite" his arbitrary lines deeply; 
the sharp contrasts of black and white enable him 
to portray, without the fiery-hued rhetoric of 
either Chateaubriand or Hugo, the finest split 
shades of thought and emotion. Never colour, 
only nuance — and the slash and sweep of a drastic 
imagination. 

He was an inveterate illusionist in all that con- 
cerned himself; even with himself he was not 
always sincere — and he usually wrote of himself. 
His many books are a masquerade behind which 
one discerns the posture of the mocker, the sensi- 
bility of a reversed idealist, and the spirit of a bit- 
ter analyst. This sensibility must not be con- 
founded with the sensibilite of a Maurice de 
Guerin. Rather it is the morbid sensitiveness 
of a Swift combined with an unusual receptivity 
to sentimental and artistic impressions. Pro- 
fessor Walter Raleigh thus describes the sensi- 

ii 



EGOISTS 

bility of those times: "The sensibility that came 
into vogue during the eighteenth century was of 
a finer grain than its modern counterpart. It 
studied delicacy, and sought a cultivated enjoy- 
ment in evanescent shades of feeling, and the 
fantasies of unsubstantial grief." Vanity ruled in 
Stendhal. Who shall say how much his unyielding 
spirit suffered because of his poverty, his enormous 
ambitions? His motto might have been: Blessed 
are the proud of spirit, for they shall inherit the 
Kingdom of Earth. He wrote in 1819: "I have 
had three passions in my life. Ambition — 1800- 
181 1 ; love for a woman who deceived me, 181 1- 
1818; and in 1818 a new passion." But then he 
was ever on the verge of a new passion, ever de- 
ceived — at least he believed himself to be — and 
he, the fearless theoretician of passion, often was, 
he has admitted, in practice the timid amateur. 
He planned the attack upon a woman's heart as a 
general plans the taking of an enemy's citadel. 
He wrote L' Amour for himself. He defined the 
rules of the game, but shivered when he saw the 
battle-field. Magnificent he was in precept, 
though not always in action. He was for this 
reason never blase, despite continual grumblings 
oyer his ennui. In his later years at Civitk 
Vecchia he yearned for companionship like a girl, 
and, a despiser of Paris and the Parisians, he 
suffered from the nostalgia of the boulevard. 
He adored Milan and the Milanese, yet Italy 
finally proved too much for his nerves; Tai tant 
vu le soleily he confessed. Contradictory and 

12 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

fantastic, he hated all authority. Merimee puts 
down to the account of the sour old abbe Raillane, 
who taught him, the distaste he entertained for 
the Church of Rome. Yet he enjoyed its aesthetic 
side. He was its admirer his life long, notwith- 
standing his gibes and irreligious jests, just as he 
was a Frenchman by reason of his capacity for 
reaction under depressing circumstances. But 
how account for his monstrous hatred for his 
father? The elder Beyle was penurious and as 
hard as flint. He nearly starved his son, for 
whom he had no affection. Henry rould not see 
him salute his mother without loathing him. 
She read Dante in the original, and her son as- 
sured himself that there was Italian blood on her 
side of the house. The youth's hatred, too, of his 
aunt Seraphie almost became a mania. It has pos- 
sibly enriched fiction by the portrait of Gina of the 
resilient temperament, the delicious Duchess of 
Sanseverina. All that she is, his aunt Seraphie was 
not, and with characteristic perversity he makes 
her enamoured of her nephew Fabrice del Dongo. 
Did he not say that parents are our first enemies 
when we enter the world ? 

His criticisms of music and painting are chiefly 
interesting for what they tell us of his tempera- 
ment. He called himself " observer of the human 
heart," and was taken by a cautious listener for 
a police spy. He seldom signed the same name 
twice to his letters. He delighted to boast of 
various avocations; little wonder the Milanese 
police drove him out of the city. He said that to 

13 



EGOISTS 

be a good philosopher one must be sec, and with- 
out illusions. Perspicacious, romantic, delicate 
in his attitude toward women, he could be rough, 
violent, and suspicious. He scandalised George 
Sand, delighted Alfred de Musset; Madame La- 
martine refused to receive him in her drawing- 
room at Rome. His intercourse with Byron was 
pleasant. He disliked Walter Scott and called 
him a hypocrite — possibly because there is no 
freedom in his love descriptions. Lord Byron in a 
long letter expostulated with Stendhal, defending 
his good friend, Scott; but Stendhal never quite 
believed in the poet's sincerity — indeed, suspect- 
ing himself, he suspected other men's motives. 
He had stage-fright when he first met Byron — 
whom he worshipped. A tremulous soul his, in 
a rude envelope. At Venice he might have made 
the acquaintance of young Arthur Schopenhauer 
and Leopardi, but he was too much interested 
in the place to care for new faces. 

He said that without passion there is neither 
virtue nor vice. (Taine made a variation on this 
theme.) A dagger-thrust is a dignified gesture 
when prompted by passion. After the Napoleonic 
disaster, Stendhal had lost all his hopes of prefer- 
ment; he kept his temper admirably, though occa- 
sionally calling his old chief bad names. It 
was a period of the flat, stale, platitudinous, and 
bourgeois. "In the nineteenth century one must 
be either a monster or a sheep/' wrote Beyle to 
Byron. A patriot is either a dolt or a rogue! 
My country is where there are most people like 

14 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

me — Cosmopolis! The only excuse for God is 
that he does not exist ! Verse was invented to aid 
the memory! A volume of maxims, witty and 
immoral, might be gathered from the writings of 
Stendhal that would equal Rivarol and Roche- 
foucauld. "I require three or four cubic feet of 
new ideas per day, as a steamboat requires coal," 
he told Romain Colomb. What energy, what lassi- 
tude this man possessed! He spoke English — 
though he wrote it imperfectly — and Italian; the 
latter excellently because of his long residence in 
Italy. 

Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, described 
Stendhal as "that remarkable man who, with a 
Napoleonic tempo, traversed his Europe, in fact 
several centuries of the European soul, as a sur- 
veyor and discoverer thereof. It has required two 
generations to overtake him one w r ay or other; 
to divine long afterward some of the riddles that 
perplexed and enraptured him — this strange 
Epicurean and man of interrogation, the last 
great psychologist of France." He also spoke of 
him as " Stendhal, who has, perhaps, had the 
most profound eyes and ears of any Frenchman 
of this century." 

Stendhal said that Shakespeare knew the 
human heart better than Racine; yet despite his 
English preferences, Stendhal is a psychologist 
of the Racinien school. When an English com- 
pany of players went to Paris in 1822, Stendhal 
defended them by pen and in person. He was 
chagrined that his fellow-countrymen should hiss 

15 



EGOISTS 

Othello or The School for Scandal. He despised 
chauvinisme } he the ideal globe-trotter. And he 
was contradictory enough to have understood Ten- 
nyson's "That man's the best cosmopolite who 
loves his native country best." He scornfully re- 
marked that in 1819 Parisian literary logic could 
be summed up thus: "This man does not agree 
with me, therefore he is a fool; he criticises my 
book, he is my enemy; therefore a thief, an assas- 
sin, a brigand, and forger." Narrow-mindedness 
must never be imputed to Stendhal. Nor was he a 
modest man — modesty that virtue of the mediocre. 
How much Tolstoy thought of the Frenchman 
may be found in his declaration that all he knew 
about war he learned first from Stendhal. " I will 
speak of him only as the author of the Chartreuse 
de Parme and Le Rouge et le Noir. These are 
two great, inimitable works of art. I am indebted 
for much to Stendhal. He taught me to under- 
stand war. Read once more in the Chartreuse 
de Parme his account of the battle of Waterloo. 
Who before him had so described war — that is, 
as it is in reality?" In 1854 they said Balzac 
and Hugo; in 1886, Balzac and Stendhal. Some 
day it may be Stendhal and Tolstoy. The Rus- 
sian with his slow, patient amassing of little facts 
but follows Stendhal's chaplet of anecdotes. 
The latter said that the novel should be a mirror 
that moves along the highway; a novel, he writes 
elsewhere, is like a bow — the violin which gives 
out the sound is the soul of the reader. And 
Goncourt assimilated this method with surpri- 

16 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

sing results. Stendhal first etched the soul of the 
new Superman, the exalted young man and woman 
— Julien Sorel and Matilde de la Mole. They 
are both immoralists. Exceptional souls, in real 
life they might have seen the inside of a prison. 
Stendhal is the original of the one; the other is the 
source of latter-day feminine souls in revolt, the 
souls of Ibsen and Strindberg. Laclos's Les 
Liaisons Dangereuses and Marivaux he has re- 
moulded — Valmont is a prototype of Julien Sorel. 
J. J. Weiss has said that profound immorality 
is probably an attribute common to all great ob- 
servers of human nature. It would require a 
devil's advocate of unusual acuity to prove Sten- 
dhal a moral man or writer. His philosophy is 
materialistic. He wrote for the " happy few" and 
longed for a hundred readers, and wished his 
readers to be those amiable, unhappy souls who 
are neither moral nor hypocritical. His egoism 
brought him no surcease from boredom. His 
diaries and letters and memoirs, so rich in general 
ideas, are valuable for the student of human nature. 
The publication of his correspondence was a reve- 
laticfn — a very sincere, human Stendhal came 
into view. His cosmopolitanism is unaffected; 
his chapters are mosaics of facts and sensations; 
his manner of narrative is, as Bourget says, a 
method of discovery as well as of exposition. 
His heroes and heroines delve into their motives, 
note their ideas and sensations. With a few ex- 
ceptions, modern romancers, novelists, psycholo- 
gists of fiction seem shallow after Stendhal. Taine 

i7 



EGOISTS 

confesses to reading Le Rouge et le Noir between 
thirty and forty times. Stendhal disliked America; 
to him all things democratic were abhorrent. 
He loathed the mass, upheld the class; an indi- 
vidualist and aristocrat like Ibsen, he would not 
recognize the doctrine of equality. The French 
Revolution was useful only because it evolved 
a strong man — Napoleon. America, being demo- 
cratic, would therefore never produce art, tragedy, 
music, or romantic love. 

It is the fate of some men to exist only as a source 
of inspiration for their fellow-artists. Shelley is 
the poet's poet, Meredith the novelist's novelist, 
and Stendhal a storehouse for psychologues. 
His virile spirit, in these times of vapid socialistic 
theories, is a sparkling and sinister pool wherein 
all may dip and be refreshed — perhaps poisoned. 
He is not orthodox as thinker or artist; but it is 
a truism that the wicked of a century ago may be 
the saints of to-morrow. To read him is to in- 
crease one's wisdom; he is dangerous only to fools. 
Like Schopenhauer and Ibsen, he did not flatter 
his public; now he has his own public. And 
nothing would have amused this charming and 
cynical man more than the knowledge of his canon- 
isation in the church of world literature. He 
gayly predicted that he would be understood 
about 1 880- 1 900; but his impertinent shadow 
projects far into the twentieth century. Will he 
be read in 1935? he has asked. Why not? A 
monument is to be erected to him in Paris. 
Rodin has designed the medallion portrait. 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 



II 



The labours, during the past twenty years, of 
Casimir Stryienski, Franf ois de Nion, L. Belugon, 
Arthur Chuquet, Henry Cordier, Pierre Brun, 
Ricciotto Canudo, Octave Uzanne, Hugues Rebell 
— to quote the names of a few devoted Sten- 
dhalians — have enabled us to decipher Sten- 
dhal's troubled life. M. Stryienski unearthed 
at Grenoble a mass of manuscript, journals, tales, 
half-finished novels, and they have been published. 
Was there any reason to doubt the existence of a 
Stendhal Club after the appearance of those two 
interesting books, Soirees du Stendhal Club, by 
Stryienski ? The compact little study in the series, 
Les Grands Ecrivains Franf ais, by Edouard Rod, 
and Colomb's biographical notice at the head of 
Armance, and Stryienski's Etude Biographique 
are the principal references for Stendhal students. 
And this, too, despite the evident lack of sympathy 
in the case of M. Rod. It is a minute, pains- 
taking etude, containing much fair criticism; 
fervent Stendhalians need to be reminded of their 
master's defects and of the danger of self-dupery. 
If Stendhal were alive, he would be the first to 
mock at his disciples' enthusiasm — the enthu- 
siasm of the parvenu, as he puts it. (He ill con- 
cealed his own in the presence of pictorial master- 
pieces or the ballets of Vigano.) Rod, after ad- 
mitting the wide influence of. Stendhal upon the 
generations that followed him, patronisingly 

19 



EGOISTS 

concludes by a quotation: "Les petits livres ont 
leurs destinees." What, then, does he call great, 
if Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de 
Parme are " little books" ? 

Marie-Henry Beyle was born at Grenoble, 
Dauphiny, January 23, 1783. He died at Paris, 
March 23, 1842, stricken on the Rue Neuve 
des Capucines by apoplexy. Colomb had his 
dying friend carried to his lodgings. He was 
buried in Montmartre Cemetery, followed there 
by Merimee, Colomb, and one other. Upon his 
monument is an epitaph composed a short time 
before he died. It is in Italian and reads: Arrigo 
Beyle, Milanese. Scrisse, Amb, Visse. Ann. 59. 
M.2. Mori 2. 23 Marzo. MDCCCXLII. (Harry 
Beyle, Milanese. Wrote, Loved, Lived. 59 
years and 2 months. He died at 2 a.m. on the 
23rd of March, 1842.) This bit of mystifica- 
tion was quite in line with Beyle's career. As he 
was baptised the English Henry, he preferred to 
be known in death as the Milanese Harry. Pierre 
Brun says that there was a transposition in the 
order of Scrisse, Amo, Visse; it should read the 
reverse. The sculptor David d' Angers made a 
medallion of the writer in 1825. It is repro- 
duced in the Rod monograph, and his son de- 
signed another for the tomb. This singular 
epitaph of a singular man did not escape the eyes 
of his enemies. Charles Monselet called him a 
renegade to his family and country; which is 
uncritical tomfoolery. Stendhal was a citizen of 
the world — and to the last a Frenchman. And 

20 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

not one of his cavilling contemporaries risked his 
life with such unconcern as did this same Beyle 
in the Napoleonic campaigns. Merimee has 
drawn for us the best portrait of Stendhal, 
Colomb, his earliest companion, wrote the most 
gossipy life. Stryienski, however, has demon- 
strated that Colomb attenuated, even erased 
many expressions of Stendhal's, and that he also 
attempted to portray his hero in fairer colours. 
But deep-dyed Stendhalians will not have their 
master transformed into a tame cat of the Parisian 
salons. His wickedness is his chief attraction, 
they think. An oft-quoted saying of StendhaPs 
has been, Stryienski shows, tampered with: "A 
party of eight or ten agreeable persons," said 
Stendhal, "where the conversation is gay and 
anecdotic, and where weak punch is handed 
around at half past twelve, is the place where I 
enjoy myself the most. There, in my element, 
I infinitely prefer hearing others talk to talking 
myself. I readily sink back into the silence of 
happiness; and if I talk, it is only to pay my ticket 
of admission." What Stendhal wrote was this: 
"Un salon de huit ou dix personnes dont toutes 
les femmes ont eu les amants," etc. The touch is 
unmistakable. 

Henry* was educated at the Ecole Centrale of 
Grenoble. When he was ten years of age, Louis 
XVI was executed, and the precocious boy, to an- 
noy his father, displayed undisguised glee at the 
news. He served the mass, an altar-boy at the Con- 
vent of the Propagation, and revealed unpleasant 

21 



EGOISTS 

traits of character. His father he called by a 
shocking name, but the death of his mother, when 
he was seven, he never forgot. He loved her in 
true Stendhalian style. His maiden aunt Sera- 
phie ruled the house of the elder Beyle, and 
Henry's two sisters, Pauline — the favourite of 
her brother — and Zenaide, most tyrannically. 
His young existence was a cruel battle with his 
elders, excepting his worthy grandfather, Doctor 
Gagnon, an esprit fort of the approved eighteenth- 
century variety. On his book-shelves Henry 
found Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Holbach, and eagerly 
absorbed them. A great-aunt taught him that 
the pride of the Spaniard was the best quality of 
a man. When he heard of his aunt's death, he 
threw himself on his knees and passionately 
thanked the God in whom he had never believed. 
His father, Cherubin- Joseph Beyle, was chevalier 
of the Legion of Honor and his family of old 
though not noble stock. Its sympathies were 
aristocratic, royalist, while Henry — certainly not 
a radical in politics — loved to annoy his father by 
his Jacobin opinions. He in turn was ridiculed 
by the Dauphinois when he called himself de 
Stendhal. Not a lovable boy, certainly, and, it is 
said, scarcely a moral one. At school they nick- 
named him "la Tour ambulante," because of his 
thick-set figure. He preferred mathematics to 
all other studies, as he contemplated entering 
l'Ecole Polytechnique. November 10, 1799, 
found him in Paris with letters for his cousins 
Daru. They proved friendly. He was after- 

22 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

ward, through the influence of Pierre Daru, min- 
ister of war, made lieutenant of cavalry, commis- 
sary and auditor of the Council of State. He 
served in the Italian campaign, following Napo- 
leon through the Saint Bernard pass two days 
later. Aide-de-camp of General Michaud, he 
displayed sang-froid under fire. He was present 
at Jena and Wagram, and asked, during a day of 
fierce fighting, "Is that all?" War and love only 
provoked from this nonchalant person the same 
question. Lie was always disappointed by re- 
ality; and, as Rod adds, "Is that all?" might be 
the hit motiv of his life. Forced by sickness to 
retire to Vienna, he was at the top-notch of his 
life in Paris and Milan, 1810-1812. He left 
a brilliant position to rejoin the Emperor in 
Russia. In 1830 he was nominated consul at 
Trieste; but Metternich objected because of Sten- 
dhal's reputation as a political intrigant in Milan, 
ten years earlier — a reputation he never deserved. 
He was sent to Civita Vecchia, where he led a dull 
existence, punctuated by trips to Rome, and, at 
long intervals, to Paris. From 18 14 to 1820 he 
lived in Milan, and in love, a friend of Manzoni, 
Silvio Pellico, Monti. The police drove him back 
to Paris, and he says it was the deadliest blow to 
his happiness. For a decade he remained here, 
leading the life of a man around town, a subli- 
mated gossip, dilettante, surface idler; withal, a 
hard worker. A sybarite on an inadequate in- 
come, he was ever the man of action. Embroiled 
in feminine intrigues, sanguine, clairvoyant, and 

23 



EGOISTS 

a sentimentalist, he seldom contemplated mar- 
riage. Once, at Civita Vecchia, a young woman of 
bourgeois extraction tempted him by her large 
dot; but inquiries made at Grenoble killed his 
chances. Indeed, he was not the stuff from which 
the ideal husband is moulded. He did not en- 
tertain a high opinion of matrimony. He said 
that the Germans had a mania for marriage, an 
institution which is servitude for men. On a trip 
down the Rhone, in 1833, he met George Sand and 
Alfred de Musset going to Italy — to that Venice 
which was the poet's Waterloo and Pagello's 
victory. Stendhal behaved so madly, so boister- 
ously, and uttered such paradoxes that he offended 
Madame Dudevant-Sand, who openly expressed 
her distaste for him, though admiring his brill- 
iancy. De Musset had a pretty talent for sketch- 
ing and drew Stendhal dancing at the inn before 
a servant. It is full of verve. He also wrote 
some verse about the French consul at Civitk 
Vecchia: 

u Ou Stendhal, cet esprit charmant, 
Remplissait si devotement 
Sa sinecure." 

Sinecure it was, though ennui ruled; but he 
had his memories, and Rome was not far away. 
In 1832, while at San Pietro in Montorio, he be- 
thought himself of his age. Fifty years would 
soon arrive. He determined to write his memoirs. 
And we have the Vie de Henri Brulard, Souvenirs 
d'Egotisme, and the Journal (1801-1814). In 

24 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

their numerous pages — for he was an indefatigable 
graphomaniac — may be found the thousand and 
one experiences in love, war, diplomacy that made 
up his life. His boasted impassibility, like Flau- 
bert's, does not survive the test of these letters 
and intimate confessions. Merimee, too, wrote 
to Jenny Dacquin without his accustomed mask. 
Stendhal is the most personal of writers; each 
novel is Henry Beyle in various situations, making 
various and familiar gestures. 

His presence was welcome in a dozen salons of 
Paris. He preferred, however, a box at la Scala, 
listening to Rossini or watching a Vigano ballet, 
near his beloved Angela. But after seven years 
Milan was closed to him, and as he was known in 
a restricted circle at Paris as a writer of power, 
originality, and as an authority on music and 
painting, he returned there in 182 1. He fre- 
quented the salon of Destutt de Tracy, whose 
ideology and philosophic writings he admired. 
There he saw General Lafayette and wrote ma- 
liciously of this hero, who, though seventy-five, 
was in love with a Portuguese girl of nineteen. 
The same desire to startle that animated Baude- 
laire kept Beyle in hot water. He was a visitor 
at the home of Madame Cabanis, of M. Cuvier, 
of Madame Ancelot, Baron Gerard, and Castel- 
lane, and on Sundays, at the salon of Etienne 
Delacluze, the art critic of the D'ebats, and a daily 
visitor at Madame Pasta's. He disliked, in his 
emphatic style, Victor Cousin, Thiers, and his host 
Delacluze. For Beyle to dislike a man was to 

25 



EGOISTS 

announce the fact to the four winds of heaven, 
and he usually did so with a brace of bon-mots 
that set all Paris laughing. Naturally, his ene- 
mies retaliated. Some disagreeable things were 
said of him, though none quite so sharp as the 
remark made by a certain Madame Celine: " Ah! 
I see M. Beyle is wearing a new coat. Madame 
Pasta must have had a benefit." This witticism 
was believed, because of the long friendship be- 
tween the Italian cantatrice and the young French- 
man. He occupied a small apartment in the same 
building, though it is said the attachment was 
platonic. 

In 1800 he met, at Milan, Signora Angela 
Pietragrua. He loved her. Eleven years later, 
when he returned to Italy, this love was revived. 
He burst into tears when he saw her again. Quello 
e il Chinese! explained the massive Angela to her 
father. Even that lovetap did not disconcert the 
furnace-like affection of Henry. This Angela made 
him miserable by her coquetries. The feminine 
characters in his novels and tales are drawn from 
life. His essay on Love is a centaine of experiences 
crystallised into maxims and epigrams. This man 
of too expansive heart, who confessed to trepidation 
in the presence of a woman he loved, displayed sur- 
prising delicacy. Where he could not respect, he 
could not love. His sensibility was easily hurt; 
he abhorred the absence of taste. Love was for 
him a mixture of moonshine, esprit, and physical 
beauty. A very human man, Henry Beyle, though 
he never viewed woman exactly from the same 

26 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

angle as did Dante; or, perhaps, his many Bea- 
trices proved geese. 

Stryienski relates that, on their return from 
Italy in i860, Napoleon III and the Empress 
Eugenie visited Grenoble and, in the municipal 
library, saw a portrait of Stendhal. "But that is 
M. Beyle, is it not?" cried the Empress. "How 
comes his portrait here?" "He was born at Gre- 
noble," responded Gariel, the librarian. She re- 
membered him, this amusing mature friend of her 
girlhood. The daughters of Madame de Montijo, 
Eugenie and Paca, met Beyle through Merimee, 
who was intimate with their mother. The two 
girls liked him; he spun for them his best yarns, 
he initiated them into new games; in a word, he 
was a welcome guest in the household, and there 
are two letters in the possession of Auguste Cor- 
dier, one addressed to Beyle by E. Guzman y 
Palafox dated December, 1839, when the future 
Empress of the French was thirteen; the other 
from her sister Paca, both affectionate and of a 
charm. The episode was a pleasant one in the 
life of Beyle. 

Merimee also arranged a meeting between 
Victor Hugo and Beyle in 1829 or 1830. Sainte- 
Beuve was present, and in a letter to Albert Col- 
lignon, published in Vie litteraire, 1874, he writes 
of the pair as two savage cats, their hair bristling, 
both on the defensive. Hugo knew that Beyle 
was an enemy of poetry, of the lyric, of the " ideal." 
The ice was not broken during the evening. Beyle 
had an antipathy for Hugo, Hugo thoroughly 

27 



EGOISTS 

disliked Beyle. And if we had the choice to- 
day between talking 'with Hugo or Beyle, is there 
any doubt as to the selection ? — Beyle the 
raconteur of his day. He was too clear-sighted 
to harbour any illusions concerning literary folk. 
Praise from one's colleagues is a brevet of re- 
semblance, he has written. Doesn't this sound 
like old Dr. Johnson's "The reciprocal civility of 
authors is one of the most risible scenes in the 
farce of life"? 



Ill 



Prosper Merimee has told us that his friend 
and master, Henry Stendhal-Beyle, was wedded 
to the old-fashioned theory: a man should not be 
in a woman's company longer than five minutes 
without making love; granting, of course, that 
the woman is pretty and pleasing. This idea 
Stendhal had imbibed when a soldier in the Na- 
poleonic campaign. It was hussar tactics of the 
First Empire. "Attack, attack, attack," he cries. 
His book De l'Amour practically sets forth the 
theory; but like most theoreticians, Stendhal was 
timid in action. He was a sentimentalist — he 
the pretended cynic and blase man of the world. 
Merimee acknowledges that much of his own and 
Stendhal's impassibility was pure posing. Never- 
theless, with the exceptions of Goethe and Byron, 
no writer of eminence in the last century enjoyed 
such a sentimental education as Stendhal. At 
Weimar the passionate pilgrim may see a small 

28 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

plaque which contains portraits of the women 
beloved by Goethe — omitting Frederike Brion. 
True to the compass of Teutonic sentimentality, 
Goethe's mother heads the list. Then follow the 
names of Cornelia, Katchen Schonkopf, Lotte 
Buff, Lili Schonemann, Corona Schroter, Frau 
von Stein, Christiane Vulpius — later Frau von 
Goethe — Bettina von Arnim, Minna Herzlieb, 
and Marianne v. Willemer; with their respec- 
tive birth and death dates. Several other names 
might have been added, notably that of the Polish 
pianiste Goethe encountered at Marienbad. The 
collection is fair-sized, even for a poet who lived 
as long as Goethe and one who reproached 
Balzac with digging from a woman's heart each 
of his novels. To both Goethe and Stendhal the 
epigram of George Meredith might be applied: 
"Men may have rounded Seraglio Point. They 
have not yet doubled Cape Turk." 

The wonder is that thus far no devoted Sten- 
dhalian has prepared a similar carton with the 
names and pictures of their master's — dare we 
say ? — victims. Stendhal loved many women, 
and like Goethe his first love was his mother. 
For him she was the most precious image of all, 
and he was jealous of his father. This was at the 
age of seven; but the precocity of the boy and his 
exaggerated sensibility must be remembered — 
which later brought him so much unhappiness and 
so little joy. A casual examination of the list of 
his loves, reciprocated or spurned, would make a 
companion to that of Weimar. Their names are 

29 



EGOISTS 

Melanie Guilbert-Louason, Angela Pietragrua, 
Mile. Beretter, the Countess Palffy, Menta, Elisa, 
Livia B., Madame Azur, Mina de Grisheim, 
Mme. Jules, and la petite P. The number he 
loved without consolation was still larger. De- 
spite his hussar manoeuvres, Stendhal was easily 
rebuffed. It is odd that Goethe's and Stendhal's 
fair ones, upon whom they poured poems and 
novels, did not die — that is, immediately — on 
being deserted. Goethe relieved the pain of 
many partings by writing a poem or a play and 
seeking fresh faces. Stendhal did the same — 
substituting a novel or a study or innumerable 
letters for poems and plays. He believed that 
one nail drove out another; which is very soothing 
to masculine vanity. But did any woman break 
her heart because of his fickleness ? Frau von 
Stein of all the women loved by Goethe probably 
took his defection seriously. She didn't kill her- 
self, however. He wounded many a heart, yet 
the majority of his loves married, and appar- 
ently happily. Stendhal, ugly as he was, slew 
his hundreds; they recovered after he had passed 
on to fresh conquests; a fact that he, with his ac- 
customed sincerity, did not fail to note. Yet 
this same gallant was among the few in the 
early years of the nineteenth century to declare 
for the enfranchisement, physical and spiritual, 
of woman. He was &ferniniste. But, in reality, 
his theory of love resembled that of the writer 
who said that "it was simple and brief, like a 
pressure of the hand between sympathetic persons, 

3o 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

or a gay luncheon between two friends of which 
a pleasant memory remains, if not also a gentle 
gratitude toward the companion." I quote from 
memory. 

It was at Rome that he first resolved to tell 
the story of his life. In the dust he traced 
the initials of the beloved ones. In his book he 
omitted no details. His motto was: la verite toute 
nue. If he has not spared himself, he has not 
spared others. What can the critics, who recently 
blamed George Moore for his plain speech in his 
memoirs, say to Stendhal's journals and La Vie de 
Henri Brulard? Many of the names were at 
first given with initials or asterisks; Merimde 
burned the letters Stendhal sent him, and regretted 
the act. But the Stendhalians, the young enthusi- 
asts of the Stendhal Club, have supplied the miss- 
ing names — those of men and women who have 
been dead half a century and more. 

De P Amour, Stendhal's remarkable study of 
the love-passion, is marred by the attempt to im- 
prison a sentiment behind the bars of a mathe- 
matical formula. He had inherited from his 
study of Condillac, Helvetius, Tracy, Chamfort 
the desire for a rigid schematology, for geometrical 
demonstration. The word " logic" was always 
on the tip of his tongue, and he probably would 
have come to blows with Professor Jowett for 
his dictum, uttered at the close of a lecture: 
" Logic is neither an art nor a science, but a 
dodge." Love for Stendhal was without a Be- 
yond. It was a matter of the senses entirely. 

3 1 



EGOISTS 

The soul counted for little, manners for much. 
A sentimental epicurean, he is the artistic de- 
scendant of Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, both 
by tradition and temperament. Stendhal fell 
into the mistake of the metaphysician in setting 
up numerous categorical traps to snare his sub- 
ject. They are artificial, and yet bear a re- 
semblance to certain Schopenhauerian theories. 
Both men practised what they did not preach. 
" Beauty is a promise of happiness/' wrote Sten- 
dhal, and it was so effective that Baudelaire re- 
wrote it with a slight variation. The " crystallisa- 
tion" formula of Stendhal occurred to him while 
down in a salt mine near Salzburg. He saw an elm 
twig covered with sparkling salt crystals, and he 
used it as an image to express the love that dis- 
cerns in the beloved one all perfections. There 
are several crystallisations during the course of 
"true love." His book is more autobiographical 
than scientific; that the writer gleaned the facts 
from his own heart-experiences adds to the value 
and veracity of the work. As a catechism for 
lovers, it is unique; and it was so well received 
that from 1822 to 1833 there were exactly seven- 
teen copies sold. But it has been plundered by 
other writers without acknowledgment. Stendhal 
and Schopenhauer could have shaken hands on 
the score of their unpopularity — and about 1880 
on their sudden recrudescence. 

With all his display of worldly wisdom Sten- 
dhal really loved but three times in his life; 
this statement may shock some of his disciples 

32 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

who see in him a second Casanova, but a study 
of his life will prove it. He had gone to Paris 
with the established conviction that he must 
become a Don Juan. That was — comical or 
shocking as it may sound — his projected pro- 
fession. Experience soon showed him other as- 
pects. He was too refined, too tender-hearted, 
to indulge in the conventional dissipations of ado- 
lescent mankind. The lunar ray of sentiment 
was in his brain; if he couldn't idealise a woman, 
he would leave her. It was his misfortune, the 
lady's fortune — whoever she might have been 
— and the world's good luck that he never was 
married. As a husband he would have been 
a glorious failure. Melanie Guilbert-Louason 
was an actress in Paris, who, after keeping him on 
tenter-hooks of jealousy, accepted his addresses. 
He couldn't marry her, because the allowance 
made by his father did not suffice for himself; 
besides, she had a daughter by a former marriage. 
He confesses that lack of money was the chief 
reason for his timidity with women; a millionaire, 
he might have been a conquering and detestable 
hero. Like Frederic Moreau in L' Education 
Sentimentale, Stendhal always feared interruption 
from a stronger suitor, and his fears were usually 
verified. But he went with Guilbert to Marseilles, 
where she was acting, and to support himself took 
a position in a commercial house. That for him 
meant a grand passion; he loathed business. She 
married a Russian, Baskow by name. Sten- 
dhal was inconsolable for weeks. How he would 

33 



EGOISTS 

have applauded the ironical cry of Jules La- 
forgue's Hamlet: " Stability! stability! thy name 
is Woman." Although he passed his days em- 
broidering upon the canvas of the Eternal Mascu- 
line portraits of the secular sex, Stendhal first 
said, denying a certain French king, that women 
never vary. 

He fell into abysmal depths of love with Angela 
Pietragrua at Milan. He was a dashing soldier, 
and if Angela deceived him he was youthful 
enough to stand the shock. Eleven years later 
he revisited Milan and wept when he saw Angela 
again. He often wept copiously, a relic possibly 
of eighteenth-century sensibilities. Angela did not 
weep. She, however, was sufficiently touched to 
start a fresh affair with her faithful Frenchman. 
He did not always enjoy smooth sailing. There 
were a dozen women that either scorned him or 
else remained unconscious of his sentiments. 
One memory remained with him to the last 
— recall his cry of loneliness to Romain Colomb 
when languishing as a French consul at Civitk 
Vecchia: "I am perishing for want of love!" 
He thought doubtless of Metilde, wife of Gen- 
eral Dembowsky, who from 1818 to 1824 (let 
us not concern ourselves if these dates coincide 
with or overlap other love-affairs; Stendhal was 
very versatile) neither encouraged nor discour- 
aged at Milan the ardent exile. So infatuated was 
he that he neglected his chances with the actress 
Vigano, and also with the Countess Kassera. 
Madame Dembowsky, who afterward did not 

34 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

prove so cruel to the conspirator Ugo Foscolo, 
allowed Stendhal the inestimable privilege of 
kissing her hand. He sighed like a schoolboy 
and trailed after the heartless one from Milan to 
Florence, from Florence to Rome. The gossip 
that he was the lover in Paris of the singer Pasta 
caused the Dembowsky to deny him hope. He 
was sincerely attached to her. Had she said 
"Kill yourself," he would have done so. Yes, 
such a romantic he was. She was born Viscon- 
tini and separated from a brutal soldier of a hus- 
band. Her cousin, Madame Traversi, was an 
obstacle in this unhappy passion of Stendhal's. 
She hated him. Metilde died at the age of thirty- 
eight, in 1825. Because of her he had replied 
to Mile. Vigano — when she asked him: " Beyle, 
they say that you are in love with me!" "They 
are fooling you." For this he was never for- 
given. It is a characteristic note of Stendhalian 
frankness — Stendhal, who never deceived anyone 
but himself. Here is a brace of his amiable 
sayings on the subject of Woman: — 

"La fidelite des femmes dans le mariage, lorsqu' 
il n'y a pas d' amour, est probablement une 
chose contre nature." 

"La seule chose que je voie a blamer dans la 
pudeur, c'est de conduire a Phabitude de mentir." 



35 



EGOISTS 



IV 



A promenader of souls and cities, Stendhal 
was a letter- writer of formidable patience; his 
published correspondence is enormous. How 
enormous may be seen in the three volumes pub- 
lished at Paris by Charles Bosse, the pages of 
which number 1,386. These letters begin in 
1800, when Stendhal was a precocious youth of 
seventeen, and end 1842, a few days before his 
death. There are more than 700 of them, and 
he must have written more — probably several 
thousand; for we know that Merimee destroyed 
nearly all his correspondence with Stendhal, and 
we read of 300 written to a Milanese lady — his 
one grand, because unsuccessful, passion. But 
a few of these are included, the remainder doubt- 
less having been burned for prudence' sake. The 
earliest edition of the Stendhal letters appeared 
in 1855, edited by Prosper Merimee, with an in- 
troduction by the author of Carmen. The present 
edition is edited by two devoted Stendhalians, 
Ad. Paupe and P. A. Cheramy. It comprises all 
the earlier correspondence, the letters printed in 
the Souvenirs d'Egotisme (1892), some letters 
never before published, Lettres Intimes (1892), 
and letters published in the first series of Soirees 
du Stendhal Club (1905). There are also letters 
from the archives of the Ministers of the Interior, 
of War, and of Foreign Affairs — altogether a 
complete collection, though ugly in appearance, 

36 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

resembling a volume of Congressional reports, 
but valuable to the Stendhal student. 

For the first time the names of his correspond- 
ents appear in full. Merimee suppressed most 
of them or gave only the initials. We learn who 
these correspondents were, and there is a general 
key for the deciphering of the curious names Sten- 
dhal bestowed upon them — he was a wag and 
a mystifier in this respect. His own signature 
was seldom twice alike. A list is given and 
reaches the number of one hundred and seventy- 
nine pseudonyms. Maurice Barres has written 
a gentle preface rather in the air, which he 
entitled: Stendhal's Sentiment of Honour. One 
passage is worthy of quotation. Barres asserts 
that Stendhal never asked whether a sentiment 
or an act was useful or fecund, but whether it 
testified to a thrilling energy. Since the prag- 
matists are claiming the Frenchman as one of 
their own, this statement may prove revelatory. 

The first volume is devoted to his years of 
apprenticeship (1800-1806) and his active life 
(1808-1814). The majority of the letters are 
addressed to his sister, Pauline Beyle, at Grenoble, 
a sympathetic soul. With the gravity of a young, 
green philosopher, he addresses to her homilies 
by the yard. Sixty instructing twenty! He tells 
her what to read, principally the eighteenth cen- 
tury philosophers: Rousseau, Voltaire, Helvetius, 
Tracy, Locke — amusing and highly moral read- 
ing for a lass — and he never wearies of praising 
Shakespeare. "I am a Romantic," he says else- 

37 



EGOISTS 

where; "that is, I prefer Shakespeare to Racine, 
Byron to Boileau." This worldly-wise youth 
must have bored his sister. She understood him, 
however, and as her life at home with a disagree- 
able and avaricious father was not happy, her 
correspondence with brother Henry must have 
been a consolation. He does not scruple to call 
his father hard names, and recommends his sister 
not to marry for love but for a comfortable home. 
She actually did both. Edouard Mounier is 
another correspondent; also Felix Faure, born in 
Stendhal's city, Grenoble. We learn much of the 
Napoleonic campaigns in which Stendhal served, 
particularly of the burning of Moscow and the 
disastrous retreat of the French army. Related 
by an eye-witness whose style is concise, whose 
power of observation is extraordinary, these letters 
possess historic value. 

All Paris and Milan are in the second volume, 
The Man of the World and the Dilettante (1815- 
1830) ; while The Public Functionary and Novelist 
are the themes of volume three (1830-1842). 
The friends with whom Stendhal corresponded 
were Guizot, Thiers, Balzac, Byron, Walter Scott, 
Sainte-Beuve, and many distinguished noblemen 
and men of affairs. He had friends in London, 
Thomas Moore and Sutton-Sharp among the 
rest; and he visited England several times. Baron 
Mareste and Romain Colomb were confidants. 
Stendhal, with an irony that never deserted him, 
wrote obituary notices of himself because Jules 
Janin had jestingly remarked that when Stendhal 

38 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

died he would furnish plenty of good material 
for the necrologists. The articles in guise of letters 
sent to M. Stritch of the German Review, London, 
are tedious reading; besides, there are too many 
of them. 

As a man whose ears and eyes were very close 
to the whirring of contemporary events, his de- 
scriptions of Napoleon and Byron are peculiarly 
interesting. At first Napoleon had been a demi- 
god, then he was reviled because with the Corsi- 
can's downfall he lost his chances for the future. 
He had witnessed the coronation and did not 
forget that Talma had given the young Bona- 
parte free tickets to the Comedie Franfaise; 
also that Pope Pius VII. pronounced Latin 
Italian fashion, thus: Spiritous sanctous. As 
the Emperor passed by on horseback, cheered 
by the mobs, "he smiled' his smile of the theatre, 
in which one shows the teeth, but with eyes that 
smile not." Stendhal tells us that the Emperor 
had forehead and nose in an unbroken line, a 
common trait in certain parts of France, he adds. 

He first encountered Byron in the year 1812, 
at Milan. It was in a box of the Scala. He 
was overcome by the beauty of the poet, by his 
graciousness. Here we see Stendhal, no longer 
a soldier or a cynic, but a man of sensibility, al- 
most a hero-worshipper. Byron was agreeable. 
They met often. When Byron's physician and 
secretary, Polidori, was arrested by the Milan 
secret police, Stendhal relates that the English- 
man's rage was appalling. Byron resembled 

39 



EGOISTS 

Napoleon, declared Stendhal, in his marble 
wrath. Another time the French author advised 
Byron, who lived at a distance from the opera 
house, to take a carriage, as after midnight walk- 
ing was dangerous in Milan. Coldly though 
politely Byron asked for some indication of his 
route and then, during a painful silence, he left 
poor Stendhal staring after him as he hobbled away 
in the darkness. Such human touches are worth 
more than the letters in which the literature of 
the day is discussed. 

Ten years later, from Genoa (1823), Byron 
wrote Stendhal, whom he apparently liked, thank- 
ing him for a notice he had read of himself in the 
latter' s book, Rome, Naples, et Florence. Supreme 
master of the anecdote, these letters may serve 
as an introduction to StendhaFs works, though 
we wish for more of the tender epistles. How- 
ever, in The Diary, the Journal and the Life of 
Henri Brulard, one may find copious and frank 
confessions of Stendhal's love-life. So little of 
the literary man was in him that at the close of 
his career, when he had received the Legion of 
Honor, he was indignant because this was be- 
stowed upon him not in his capacity of public 
functionary but as a man of letters. Adolphe 
Paupe, the editor of this bulky correspondence — 
and who knows how much more material there 
may be in the Grenoble archives ! — fittingly 
closes his brief introduction with a quotation 
from a writer the antipodes of Stendhal, the 
parabolic Barbey d'Aurevilly, who, after calling 

40 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

the correspondence " adorable/' adds that it 
possesses the unheard-of charm of StendhaPs 
other books, a charm which is inexhaustible. 
Notwithstanding this eloquence, I prefer the old 
edition compiled by Merimee. There is such a 
thing as too much Stendhal, although every scrap 
of his writing may be sacred to his disciples. 

I am glad, therefore, to note in the second 
series of the Soirees du Stendhal Club, that the 
principal Stendhalian — or Beyliste, as some 
name themselves — Casimir Stryienski, shows 
a disposition to mock at the antics of over- 
heated Stendhalians. M. Stryienski, who has 
been called by Paul Bourget "the man of affairs 
of the Beyliste family," dislikes the idea of a 
Stendhal cult and wonders how the ironic and 
humorous Beyle would have treated the worship- 
pers who wish to make of him a mystic god — which 
is the proper critical attitude. Beyle-Stendhal 
would have been the first man to overthrow any 
altar erected to his worship. The second series, 
collated by Stryienski and Paul Arbelet, is hardly 
as novel as the first. The most important article 
is devoted to the question whether Stendhal dedi- 
cated to Napoleon his History of Painting (mostly 
borrowed from Lanzi's book). The 1817 dedi- 
cation is enigmatic; it might have meant Napoleon, 
or Louis XVIII. , or the Czar Alexander of Russia. 
M. Arbelet holds to the latter, as Stendhal was so 
poor that he hoped for a position as preceptor in 
Russia and thought by the ambiguity of his dedi- 
cation to catch the favourable eye of the Czar, 

41 



EGOISTS 

Napoleon was at Saint Helena and a hateful king 
was on the throne of France. Let all three be 
duped, said to himself the merry Stendhal. 
That is Arbelet's theory. When in 1854 a new 
edition of the history appeared, it was headed by a 
touching, almost tearful dedication to the exile 
at Saint Helena! Stendhal's executor, Romain 
Colomb, had found it among the papers of the 
dead author, and as Napoleon was dead he pub- 
lished it. Evidently Stendhal had written several, 
and for politic reasons had selected the misleading 
one of the 181 7 edition. Recall Beethoven's 
magnificent rage when he tore into pieces the 
dedicatory page of his Eroica Symphony, on 
hearing that his hero, Napoleon, had crowned 
himself Emperor. Quite Stendhalian this, Machi- 
avellian, and also time-serving. No doubt he 
smiled his wicked smile — with tongue in cheek 
— at the trick, and no doubt his true disciples 
applaud it. He was the Superman of his day, 
one who bothered little with moral obligations. 
His favourite device was a line of verse from an 
old opera bouffe: "Vengo adesso di Cosniopoli"; 
and what has a true cosmopolitan, a promenader 
of cities and prober of souls, in common with such 
a bourgeois virtue as truth-telling ? If, as Metch- 
nikoff asserts, a man is no older than his arteries, 
then a thinker is only as old as his curiosity. 
Beyle was ever curious, impertinently so — the 
Paul Pry of psychologists. 



42 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 



His cult grows apace, and like all cults will be 
overdone. First France, then Italy, and now 
Germany has succumbed to the novels, memoirs, 
and delightful gossiping books of travel written by 
the Frenchman from Grenoble. But what a literary 
and artistic gold-mine his letters, papers, manu- 
scripts of unfinished novels have proved to men 
like Casimir Stryienski and the rest. Even in 1909 
the Stendhal excavators are busy with their pickers 
and stealers. Literary Paris becomes enthusiastic 
when a new batch of correspondence is unearthed 
at Grenoble or elsewhere. Recently a cahier — in- 
complete to be sure, but indubitably Stendhal's — 
was found and printed. It was a section of the 
famous journal exhumed in the library of Gre- 
noble by Stryienski during 1888. Published in the 
Mercure de France, it bore the title of Fin du 
Tour dTtalie en 181 1. It consists of brief, al- 
most breathless notes upon Naples, its music, 
customs, streets, inhabitants. References to An- 
cona, to the author's second sojourn in Milan, and 
to his numerous lady-loves — each one of whom 
he lashed himself into believing unique — are 
therein. He placed Mozart and Cimarosa above 
all other composers, and Shakespeare above 
Racine. Naturally the man who loved Mozart 
was bound to adore Raphael and Correggio. 
Lombard and Florentine masters he rated higher 
than the Dutch. Indeed, he abhorred Rem- 

43 



EGOISTS 

brandt and Rubens almost as much as William 
Blake abhorred them, though not for the same 
reason. Despite his perverse and whimsical 
spirit, Stendhal was, in the larger sense, all of a 
piece. His likes and dislikes in art are so many 
witnesses to the unity of his character. 

Maurice Barres relates that at the age of twenty 
he was in Rome, where he met in the Villa Medici 
its director, M. Hebert, the painter (died 1908), 
who promptly asked the young Frenchman: "Do 
you admire Stendhal?" and proceeded to explain 
that the writer of La Chartreuse de Parme was 
his cousin, and once consul at Civita Vecchia, 
although he spent most of his time in Rome. 
Stendhal's Promenades had offended the Pope, 
so these visits were really stolen ones. Bored to 
death in the stuffy little town where he represented 
the French Government, Stendhal had been re- 
proved more than once for the dilatory perform- 
ance of his duties. Hebert, after warning Barrks 
not to study him too deeply, described him as an 
old gentleman of exceeding but capricious esprit. 
He roamed among the picture galleries, exclaim- 
ing joyously before some old Greek marble or 
knitting his brows in the Sistine Chapel. Raphael 
was more to his taste than Michaelangelo, as might 
have been expected from one who went wild over 
the ballets Vigano. Another anecdote is one that 
reveals the malicious, almost simian trickiness of 
Beyle-Stendhal. An English lady, a traveller bent 
on taking notes for a book about Paris, was shown 
around the city by Stendhal. Seriously, and with 

44 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

his usual courtesy, he gave her an enormous 
amount of misinformation, misnaming public 
buildings, churches, the Louvre, its pictures, and 
nicknaming well-known personages. All this with 
the hope that she would reproduce it in print. 
Not very spirituel, this performance of M. Beyle. 
He was an admirer of English folk and their litera- 
ture, and corresponded in a grotesque sort of 
English with several prominent men and women 
in London. We find him writing a congratulatory 
letter to Thomas Moore on his Lalla Rookh, com- 
placently remarking that the ingrained Hebraism 
of English character and literature made the pro- 
duction of such an exotic poem all the more 
wonderful. Though he could praise the gew- 
gaws and tinsel of Moore's mock Orientalism, he 
openly despised the limpidity of Lamartine's 
elegiac verse and the rhythmic illuminated thunder 
of Victor Hugo. 

It is not generally known that Stendhal's 
friend and disciple, Prosper Merimee, left an 
anonymous book, of which there are not many 
examples, though it has been partially reprinted. 
It is entitled "H. B. [Henry Beyle], par un des 
quarante, avec un frontispice stupefiant dessin£ 
et grave. Eleutheropolis, Tan 1864 du mensonge 
Nazareen." Now, there is a " stupefying" draw- 
ing, a project for a statue, by Felicien Rops, the 
etcher. It depicts the new world-city of Eleuther- 
opolis — a Paris raised to the seventh heaven of 
cosmopolitanism — with Stendhal set in its midst. 
Rops was evidently contented to take the little pot- 

45 



EGOISTS 

bellied caricature of Henri Monnier, which Mon- 
nier declared was not exaggerated, and put it on 
a pedestal. In his familiar and amusing manner 
the illustrator shows us multitudes from every 
quarter of the globe travelling by every known 
method of conveyance. The idea of teeming 
nationalities is evoked. All sorts and conditions 
of men and women are hurrying to pay their 
homage to Stendhal, who, hat in hand, stomach 
advancing, legs absurdly curving, umbrella under 
his arm, and his ironical lips compressed, contem- 
plates with his accustomed imperturbability these 
ardent idolators. He seems to say: "I predicted 
that I should be understood about 1880." 

But if this cartoon of Rops is amusing, the con- 
tents of Merimee's book are equally so, both 
amusing and blasphemous. Stendhal and M£ri- 
mee got on fairly well together. Merimee tells 
what he thought of Stendhal. There are shock- 
ing passages and witty. An atheist, more be- 
cause of political reasons than religious, Sten- 
dhal relates a story about the death of God from 
heart disease. Since that time the cosmical 
machine, he asserted, has been in the hands of 
his son, an inexperienced youth who, not being an 
engineer, reversed the levers; hence the disorder 
in matters mundane. 

To prove how out of tune was Stendhal with 
his times, we have only to read his definitions of 
romanticism and classicism in his Racine et 
Shakespeare. He wrote: " Romanticism is the 
art of presenting to people literary works which 

46 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

in the actual state of their habitudes and beliefs 
are capable of giving the greatest possible pleasure; 
classicism, on the contrary, is the art of presenting 
literature which gave the greatest possible pleasure 
to their great-grandfathers." He also proclaimed 
as a corollary to this that every dead classic had 
at one time been a live romantic. Yet he was far 
from sympathising, both romantic and realist as he 
was, with the 1830 romantic movement. Nor did 
he suspect its potential historical significance; or 
his own possible significance, despite his clairvoy- 
ant prediction. He disliked Hugo, ignored Ber- 
lioz, and had no opinion at all on the genius of 
Delacroix. The painters of 1830, that we knew 
half a century later as the Barbizon school, 
he never mentions. We may imagine him abu- 
sing the impressionists in his choleric vein. His 
appreciations of art, while sound — who dare 
flout Raphael and Correggio ? — are narrow. The 
immense claims made continually by the Sten- 
dhalians for their master are balked by evidences 
of a provincial spirit. Yes; he, the first of the cos- 
mopolitans, the indefatigable globe-trotter, keenest 
of observers of the human heart, man without 
a country — he has said, "My country is where 
there are most people like me" — was often as 
blindly prejudiced as a dweller in an obscure 
hamlet. And doesn't this epigram contradict his 
idea of the proud, lonely man of genius ? It may 
seem to; in reality he was not like a Nietzschian, 
but a sociable, pleasure-loving man, seldom put- 
ting to the test his theories of individualism/ He 

47 



EGOISTS 

always sought the human quality; the passions of 
humanity were the prime things of existence for 
him. A landscape, no matter how lovely, must 
have a human or a historic interest. The fiercest 
assassin in the Trastevere district was at least a 
man of action and not a sheep. " Without pas- 
sion there is neither virtue nor vice," he preached. 
Therefore he greatly lauded Benvenuto Cellini. 
He loathed democracy and a democratic form of 
government. Brains, not votes, should rule a 
nation. He sneered at America as being hope- 
lessly utilitarian. 

In the preface to his History of Italian Painting 
he quoted Alfieri: "My only reason for writing 
was that my gloomy age afforded me no other 
occupation." From Civita Vecchia he wrote: 
"It's awful: women here have only one idea, a 
new Parisian hat. No poetry here or tolerable 
company — except with prisoners; with whom, as 
French Consul, I cannot possibly seek friendship." 
To kill the ennui of his existence he either slipped 
into Rome for a week or else wrote reams of "copy," 
most of which he never saw in print. Among 
certain intellectual circles in Paris he was known 
and applauded as a man of taste, a dilettante of 
the seven arts, though his lack of original inven- 
tion occasionally got him into scrapes. Stendhal 
might have echoed Moliere's "Je prends mon 
bien ou je le trouve"; but he would not have for- 
gotten to remind the dramatic poet that the very 
witticism was borrowed from Cyrano. 

Stryienski's Soirees du Stendhal Club actually 
48 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

presents for the delectation of the Stendhalians 
parallel columns from Lanzi and Stendhal — so 
proud are the true believers of the fold that even 
such evidences of plagiarism do not disconcert 
them. The cribbing occurs in the general re- 
flections devoted to the Renaissance. It is as 
plain as a pikestaff. Notwithstanding, we can 
read Stendhal with more interest than the original. 
His lively spirit adorns Lanzi' s laborious pages. 
Beyle's joke about the " reversed engines of 
Christianity," quoted by Merimee, and his im- 
placable dislike of the Jesuits (as may be seen in 
his masterpiece, Le Rouge et le Noir — in those 
days the Yellow Peril was the Jesuits) , did not dull 
his perception of what the papacy had done for 
art in Italy. He nearly approaches eloquence 
in his Philosophy of Art (which Taine appre- 
ciated and profited by) when writing of the popes 
of the Renaissance. He does not fail to note the 
vivifying and reforming influence of the Church 
at this period upon the brutality and lusts of the 
nobility and upon poets and painters. Adoring 
Raphael as much as he did Napoleon and Byron, 
he declared that Raphael failed in chiaroscuro 
and vaunted the superiority of Correggio in this 
particular. But he did not deign to mention 
Rembrandt. Nothing Germanic or Northern 
pleased him. He was a Latin among Latins, and 
his passion for Italy and the Italians was not as- 
sumed. He had asked of his executor that he be 
buried in the little Protestant cemetery at Rome. 
Then he changed his mind and ordered that the 

49 



EGOISTS 

cemetery of Andilly, near Montmorency, be his 
last resting-place. But the fates, that burn into 
ashes the fairest fruits of man's ambitions, dropped 
Stendhal's remains in the cemetery of Montmartre, 
Paris, where still stands the prosaic tomb with its 
falsification of the writer's birth. His epitaph he 
doubtless discovered when fabricating his life of 
Haydn. In the composer's case it runs: "Veni, 
scripsi, vixi." And when we consider the fact 
that his happiest years were in Milan, that there 
lived the object of his deepest affection, Angela 
Pietragrua, this inscription was as sincere as the 
majority of such marble ingenuities in post-mortem 
politeness. 

With all his critical limitations, Stendhal never 
gave vent to such ineptitudes as Tolstoy re- 
garding Shakespeare. The Russian, who has 
spent the latter half of his life bewailing the earlier 
and more brilliant part, would have been abhor- 
rent to the Frenchman, who died as he had lived, 
impenitent. Stendhal was a man, not a purveyor 
of words, or a maker of images. Not poetic, yet 
he did not fail to value Dante and Angelo. Virile, 
cynical, sensual, the greatest master of psychology 
of his age, he believed in action rather than thought. 
Literature he pretended to detest. Not a spinner 
of cobwebs, he left no definite system; it remained 
for Taine to gather together the loose strands of 
his sane, strong ideas and formulate them. He 
saw the world clearly, without sentiment — he, 
the most sentimental of men — and he had a 
horror of German mole-hill metaphysics. The 

50 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

eighteenth century with its hard logic, its deifica- 
tion of Reason, its picturesque atheism, enlisted 
Beyle's sympathies. Socialism was for him anath- * 
ema. 

Love and art were his watchwords. His love of 
art was on a sound basis. Joyous, charming 
music like Mozart's, Rossini's, Cimarosa's, ap- 
pealed to him; and Correggio, with his sensuous 
colouring and voluptuous design, was his favour- 
ite painter. He was complex, but he was not 
morbid. The artistic progenitor of a long line of 
analysts, supermen, criminals, and aesthetic ninnies, 
he probably would have disclaimed the entire 
crowd, including the faithful Stendhalians, be- 
cause the latter have so widely departed from 
his canons of simplicity and sunniness in art. 

But Stendhal left the soul out of his scheme of 
life; never did he knock at the gate of her dwelling- 
place. Believing with Napoleon that because the 
surgeon's scalpel did not lay bare any trace of the 
soul, there was none, Stendhal practically denied 
her existence. For this reason his windows do not 
open upon eternity. They command fair, charm- 
ing prospects. Has he not written : " J'ai recherche 
avec une sensibilite exquise la vue des beaux pay- 
sages. . . . Les paysages etaient comme un archet 
qui jouait sur mon ame" ? He meant his nerves, 
not his soul. Spiritual overtones are not sounded 
in his work. A materialist (a singularly unhappy 
home and maladroit education are to blame for 
much of his errors in after life) , he was, at least, no 
hypocrite. He loved beautiful art, women, land- 



EGOISTS 

scapes, brave feats. He confesses, in a letter to 
Colomb, dated November 25, 181 7, to planning 
a History of Energy in Italy (both Taine and 
Barres later transposed the theme to France with 
varying results). A tissue of contradictions, he 
somehow or other emerges from the mists and 
artistic embroilments of the earlier half of the 
last century a robust, soldierly, yet curious, subtle 
and enigmatic figure. It is best to employ in 
describing him his own favourite definition — he 
was " different. " And has he not said that differ- 
ence engenders hatred? 



VI 



In his brilliant and much-abused book, A Re- 
bours, the late J.-K. Huysmans describes the 
antics of a feeble-brained young nobleman who, 
having saturated himself with Baedeker's Lon- 
don, the novels of Dickens, English roast beef and 
ale, came to the comical conclusion that he might 
be disappointed if he crossed the Channel, so after 
a few hours spent within the hospitable walls 
of a Parisian English bar he gathered up his plaids, 
traps, walking-stick, and calmly returned to his 
home near the French capital. He had travelled 
to England in an easy-chair, as mentioned by 
Goldsmith — better after all than not travelling at 
all. Circumstances condemn many of us to this 
mode of motion, which comes well within the 
definition of our great-grandfathers, who called it 
The Pleasures of the Imagination. 

52 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

But there are, luckily for them, many who are 
not compelled to assist at this intellectual Bar- 
mecide's feast. They go and they come, and 
no man says them nay. Whether they see as 
much as those who voyaged in the more leisurely 
manner of the eighteenth and early nineteenth 
centuries is open to doubt. Europe or Asia 
through a car-window is only a series of rapidly 
dissolving slides, pictures that live for brief seconds. 
Modern travel is impressionistic. Nature viewed 
through a nebulous blur. Our grandfathers, if 
they didn't go as far as their descendants, con- 
trived to see more, to see a lot of delightful little 
things, note a myriad of minute traits of the coun- 
try through which they paced at such a snail's 
gait. Nowadays we hurriedly glance at the names 
of railroad stations. The ideal method of loco- 
motion is really that of the pedestrian — shanks'- 
mare ought to be popular. Vernon Lee spoke 
thus of our hero: "'Tis the mode of travelling 
that constituted the delight and matured the 
genius of Stendhal, king of cosmopolitans and 
grand master of the psychologic novel." 

It is interesting to turn back and flutter the 
pages of that perennially delightful book, Prome- 
nades dans Rome. Italy may truthfully be said to 
have been engraved upon the author's heart. 
Under the heading Manner of Travelling From 
Paris to Rome, dated March 25, 1828, he tells 
his readers, few but fit, how he made that wonder- 
ful trip. 

One of the best ways, writes Stendhal, is to 
53 



EGOISTS 

take a post-chaise, or a caleche, light and made in 
Vienna. Carry little baggage. It only means 
vexation at the various custom-houses, bother 
with the police — who treat all travellers as spies 
or suspected persons — and it will surely attract 
bandits. Besides, prices are instantly doubled 
when a post-chaise arrives. There is the mail- 
coach. It rolls along comfortably. In its capa- 
cious interior one may sleep, watch the scenery, 
converse, or read. You can go to Befort or Basel 
if you desire to pass the north of la Suisse, or to 
Pontarlier or Ferney, if desirous of reaching the 
Simplon. You may take the mail to Lyons or 
Grenoble, and pass by Mont Cenis ; or until 
Draguignan if you wish to escape the mountains 
and enter Italy by the beautiful highway, the 
work of M. de Chabral. You arrive at Nice and 
pass on to Genoa. This is the ideal route for 
scenery. 

But, continues Stendhal, the most expeditious 
and the interesting way, the one he usually took, 
begins with a forty-eight hour ride in the diligence 
as far as Befort; a carriage for which you pay a 
dozen francs will conduct you to Basel. Once 
there you may take a diligence for Lucerne — 
that singular and dangerous lake, the theatre of 
William Tell's exploits, remarks Stendhal im- 
pressively (they believed in the Tell legend, those 
innocent times) — and attain Altdorf. Here Tell 
and the apple will arouse your imagination. Then 
Italy may be entered by Saint Gothard, Bellin- 
zona, Como, and Milan. Via the Simplon was 

54 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

more to the taste of our writer. He often took the 
diligence, which at Basel went to Bern; arriving 
in the Rhone valley by way of Loukche and 
Tourtemagne, he would find his baggage, which 
had gone around by Lausanne, Saint Maurice, 
and Sion. He tells us that the conductor of the 
excellent diligence plying between Lausanne and 
Domo d'Ossola was a superior man; a glimpse 
of his calm Swiss features drives away all fear of 
danger. For ten years three times a week this 
conductor has passed the Simplon. He did not 
encounter avalanches. Anyhow, the Simplon 
route is less dangerous than Mont Cenis; there 
are fewer precipices and the edge of the road is 
bordered by trees; if the horses ran away the 
coach would not be overturned into the abyss. 
And since the opening of the Simplon route, Sten- 
dhal gravely notes, only forty travellers have 
perished, nine of them unhappy Italian soldiers 
returning from Russia. Are not these details of 
a savoury simplicity, like the faded odour of sandal- 
wood which meets your nostrils when you open 
some old secretary of your grandparents? 

Kept by a man from Lyons was a fine inn on 
the Simplon route in those days. Stendhal never 
failed to record where could be found good wines, 
cooking, and clean sheets. He usually paid twelve 
francs for a carriage to Domo d'Ossola, Lac 
Majeur (Lago Maggiore) vis-a-vis to the Borro- 
mean Islands. Four hours in a boat to Sesto 
Calende, and five hours in a fast coach — behold, 
Milan! Or you can reach Milan via Varese. 

55 



EGOISTS 

Milan to Mantua in the regular diligence. Thence 
to Bologna by a carriage, there the mail-coach. 
You go to Rome by the superb routes of Ancona 
and Loreto. You must pay thirty or thirty-five 
francs on the coach between Milan and Bologna. 
Stendhal assures us that he often found good com- 
pany in the carriages that traverse the distance 
from Bologna to Florence. It took two days to 
cover twenty leagues and cost twenty francs. 
From Florence to Rome he consumed four or five 
days, going by Perugia in preference to Siena. 
Once he travelled in company with three priests, 
of whom he was suspicious until the ice was 
broken; then with joyous anecdotes they passed 
the time, and he is surprised to find these cleri- 
cal men, who said their prayers openly three 
times a day without being embarrassed by the 
presence of strangers, were very human, very 
companionable. With his accustomed naive ex- 
pression of pleasure, he writes that they saved 
him considerable annoyance at the custom-house. 
And to-day, eighty years later, we take a train 
de luxe at Paris and in thirty hours we are in the 
Eternal City. It is swifter, more comfortable, 
and safer, our way of travelling, than Stendhal's, 
but that we see as much as he did we greatly 
doubt. The motor-car is an improvement on 
the mail-coach and the express train; you may, 
if you will, travel leisurely and privately from 
Paris to Rome. Or, why not hire a stout little car- 
riage and go through Tuscany in an old-fashioned 
manner as did the Chevalier de Pensieri- Vani ! 

56 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

Few may hope to store as many memories as 
Stendhal, yet we should see more than the oc- 
cupants of railroad drawing-rooms that whiz by us 
on the road to Rome. 



VII 



Even in our days of hasty production the 
numerous books of Stendhal provoke respectful 
consideration. What leisure they had in the 
first half of the last century! What patience 
was shown by the industrious man who worked 
to ward off ennui! He must have written twenty- 
five volumes. In 1906 the Mercure de France 
printed nineteen newly discovered letters to his 
London friend, Sutton Sharpe (Beyle visited 
London occasionally; he corresponded with 
Thomas Moore the poet, and once he spent an 
evening at a club in the company of the humourist 
Theodore Hook). But the titles of many of his 
books suffice; the majority of them are negligible. 
Who wishes to read his lives of Rossini, Haydn, 
Mozart, Metastasio? His life of Napoleon, 
posthumously published in 1876, is of more in- 
terest; Beyle had seen his subject in the flesh and * 
blood. His Racine et Shakespeare is worth 
while for the Stendhalian; none but the fanatical 
kind would care to read the History of Painting 
in Italy. There is the Correspondence, capital 
diversion, ringing with Stendhalian wit and prej- 
udice; and Promenades dans Rome is a classic; 
not inferior are Memoires d'un Touriste, or 

57 



EGOISTS 

Rome, Naples, et Florence. Indeed, the in- 
fluence of the Promenades has been pronounced. 
His three finished novels are Armance, Le Rouge 
et le Noir — which does not derive its title from 
the gambling game, but opposes the sword and the 
soutane, red and black — and La Chartreuse de 
Parme. The short stories show him at his best, 
his form being enforced to concision, his style 
suiting the brief passionate recitals of love, crime, 
intrigue, and adventure — for the most part, old 
Italian anecdotes recast; as the Italian tales of 
Hewlett are influenced by Stendhal. L'Abbesse 
de Castro could hardly have been better done by 
Merimee. In the same volume are Les Cenci, 
Vittoria Accoramboni, Vanina Vanini, and La 
Duchesse de Palliano, all replete with dramatic 
excitement and charged with Italian atmosphere. 
San Francesca a Ripa is a thrilling tale; so are 
the stories contained in Nouvelles Inedites, 
Feder (le Mari d' Argent), Le Juif (Filippo 
Ebreo) — the latter Balzac might have signed; 
and the unfinished novel, Le Chasseur Vert, 
which was at first given three other titles: Leu- 
wen, P Orange de Malte, Les Bois de Premol. 
It promised to be a rival to Le Rouge et le Noir. 
Lucien Leuwen, the young cavalry officer, is 
Stendhal himself, and he is, like Julien Sorel, the 
first progenitor of a long line in French fiction; 
disillusioned youths who, after the electric storms 
caused by the Napoleonic apparition, end in the 
sultry dilettantism of Jean, due d'Esseintes of 
Huysmans' A Rebours and in the pages of Maurice 

58 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

Barres. From Beyle to Huysmans is not such a 
remote modulation as might be imagined. Nor 
are those sick souls, Goncourt, Charles De- 
mailly and Coriolis, without the taint of beylisme. 
Lucien Leuwen is a highly organized young man 
who goes to a small provincial town w T here his 
happiness, his one love-affair, is wrecked by the 
malice of his companions. There is a sincerer 
strain in the book than in some of its predecessors. 
Armance, Stendhal's first attempt at fiction, 
is unpleasant; the theme is an impossible one — 
pathology obtrudes its ugly head. Yet, Armance 
de Zohilhoff is a creature who interests; she was 
sketched from life, Stendhal tells us, a companion 
to a lady of left-handed rank. She is an un- 
happy girl and her marriage to a babilan, Octave 
de Malivert, is a tragedy. Lamiel, a posthumous 
novel, published by Casimir Stryienski in 1888, 
contains an avant-propos by Stendhal dated from 
Civita Vecchia, May 25, 1840. (His prefaces are 
masterpieces of sly humour and ironical malice.) 
It is a very disagreeable fiction — Lamiel is the 
criminal woman with all the stigmata described 
by Lombroso in his Female Delinquent. She 
is wonderfully portrayed with her cruelty, cold- 
ness, and ferocity. She, too, like her creator, ex- 
claimed, "Is that all?" after her first bought ex- 
perience in love. She becomes attached to a 
scoundrel from the galleys, and sets fire to a palace 
to avenge his death. She is burned to cinders. 
A hunchback doctor, Sansfin by name, might 
have stepped from a page of Le Sage. 

59 



EGOISTS 

The Stendhal heroines betray their paternity. 
Madame de Renal, who sacrifices all for Julien 
Sorel, is the softest-hearted, most womanly of 
his characters. She is of the same sweet, ma- 
ternal type as Madame Arnoux in Flaubert's 
L' Education Sentimentale, though more impul- 
sive. Her love passages with Julien are the 
most original in French fiction. Mathilde de la 
Mole, pedant, frigid, perverse, snobbish, has 
nevertheless fighting blood in her veins. Lamiel 
is a caricature of her. What could be more 
evocative of Salome than her kneeling before 
Julien's severed head? Clelia Conti in the 
Chartreuse is like the conventional heroine of 
Italian romance. She is too sentimental, too 
prudish with her vow and its sophistical evasion. 
The queen of Stendhal women is Gina, la duchesse 
Sanseverina. She makes one of the immortal 
quartet in nineteenth-century fiction — the other 
three being Valerie Marneffe, Emma Bovary, and 
Anna Karenina. Perhaps if Madame de Chas- 
teller in Le Chasseur Vert had been a finished 
portrait, she might have ranked after Gina in 
interest. That lovable lady, with the morals of 
a grande dame out of the Italian Renaissance, 
will never die. She embodies all the energy, 
tantalizing charm, and paradox of Beyle. And 
a more vital woman has not swept through litera- 
ture since the Elizabethans. At one time he 
dreamed of conquering the theatre. Adolphe 
Brisson saw the ebauches for several plays; at 
least fifteen scenarios or the beginnings of them 

60 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

have been found in his literary remains. Nothing 
came of his efforts to become a second Moliere. 

Zola places Le Rouge et le Noir above La 
Chartreuse de Parme; so does Rod. The first 
novel is more sombre, more tragic; it contains 
masterly characterisations, but it is depressing 
and in spots duller than the Chartreuse. Its 
author was too absorbed in his own ego to be- 
come a master-historian of manners. Yet what 
a book is the Chartreuse for a long day. What 
etched landscapes are in it — notably the descrip- 
tions of Lake Como! What evocations of en- 
chanting summer afternoons in Italy floating 
down the mirror-like stream under a blue sky, 
with the entrancing Duchess! The episodes of 
Parmesan court intrigue are models of observa- 
tion and irony. Beyle's pen was never more de- 
lightful, it drips honey and gall. He is master 
of dramatic situations; witness the great scene in 
which the old Duke, Count Mosca, and Gina 
participate. At the close you hear the whirring 
of the theatre curtain. Count Mosca, it is said, 
was a portrait of Metternich; rather it was 
Stendhal's friend, Count de Saurau. In sooth, 
he is also very much like Stendhal — Stendhal 
humbly awaiting orders from the woman he loves. 
That Mosca was a tremendous scoundrel we need 
not doubt; yet, like Metternich and Bismarck, he 
could be cynical enough to play the game honestly. 
Despite the rusty melodramatic machinery of the 
book, its passionate silhouettes, its Pellico prisons, 
its noble bandit, its poisons, its hair-breadth es- 

61 



EGOISTS 

capes, duels and assassinations — these we must 
accept as the slag of Beyle's genius — there is 
ore rich enough in it to compensate us for the 
longueurs. 

Of his disquisition, De PAmour, with its famous 
theory of " crystallisation," much could be written. 
Not founded on a basic physiological truth as is 
Schopenhauer's doctrine of love, Beyle's is wider 
in scope. ■ It deals more with manners than 
fundamentals. It is a manual of tactics in the art of 
love by a superior strategist. His knowledge of 
woman on the social side, at least, is unparalleled. 
His definitions and classifications are keener, 
deeper than Michelet's or Balzac's. "Fernmes! 
femmes! vous etes bien toujours les memes," he 
cries in a letter to a fair correspondent. It is 
a quotidian truth that few before him had the 
courage or clairvoyancy to enunciate. Crowded 
with crisp epigrams and worldly philosophy, this 
book on Love may be studied without exhausting 
its wisdom and machiavellianism. 

Stendhal as an art or musical critic cannot be 
taken seriously, though he says some illuminating 
things; embedded in platitudes may be found 
shrewd apercus and flashes of insight; but the 
trail of the " gifted amateur" is over them all. At 
a time when Beethoven was in the ascendant, 
when Berlioz — who hailed from the environs 
of Grenoble — was in the throes of the "new 
music," when Bach had been rediscovered, Beyle 
prattles of Cimarosa. He provoked Berlioz 
with his praise of Rossini — "les plus irritantes 

62 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

stupidites sur la musique, dont il croyait avoir le 
secret," wrote Berlioz of the Rossini biography. 
Lavoix went further: "Ecrivain d'esprit . . . 
fanfaron d'ignorance en musique.'' Poor Sten- 
dhal! He had no flair for the various artistic 
movements about him, although he had unwittingly 
originated several. He praised Goethe and Schil- 
ler, yet never mentioned Bach, Beethoven, Chopin; 
music for him meant operatic music, some other 
" divine adventure" to fill in the background of 
conversation. Conversation! In that art he 
was virtuoso. To dine alone was a crime in his 
eyes. A gourmet, he cared more for talk than 
eating. He could not make up his mind about 
Weber's Freischlitz, and Meyerbeer he did not 
very much like; "he is said to be the first pianist 
of Europe," he wrote; at the time, Liszt and Thal- 
berg were disputing the kingdom of the key- 
board. It was Stendhal, so the story goes, who 
once annoyed Liszt at a musicale in Rome by 
exclaiming in his most elliptical style: u Mon che? 
Liszt, pray give us your usual improvisation this; 
evening!" 

As a plagiarist Stendhal was a success. He 
" adapted" from Goethe, translated entire pages 
from the Edinburgh Review, and the material of 
his history of Painting in Italy he pilfered from 
Lanzi. More barefaced still was his wholesale 
appropriation of Carpani's Haydine, which he 
coolly made over into French as a life of Haydn. 
The Italian author protested in a Paduan journal, 
Giomale delV Italiana Letteratura, calling Sten- 

63 



EGOISTS 

dhal by his absurd pen-name: "M. Louis- Alex- 
ander-Cesar Bombet, soi-disant Frangais auteur 
des Haydine." The original book appeared in 
1812 at Milan. Stendhal published his plagia- 
rism at Paris, 18 14, but asserted that it had been 
written in 1808. He did not stop at mere piracy, 
for in 1 8 16 and in an open letter to the Constitution- 
nel he fabricated a brother for the aforesaid 
Bombet and wrote an indignant denial of the 
facts. He spoke of Cesar Bombet as an invalid 
incapable of defending his good name. The 
life of Mozart is a very free adaptation from 
SchlichtegrolPs. When Shakespeare, Handel, and 
Richard Wagner plundered, they plundered mag- 
nificently; in comparison, Stendhal's stealings 
are absurd. 

Irritating as are his inconsistencies, his prank- 
ishness, his bombastic affectations, and preten- 
sions to a superior immorality, Stendhal's is 
nevertheless an enduring figure in French liter- 
ature. His power is now felt in Germany, where 
it is augmented by Nietzsche's popularity — Nietz- 
sche, who, after Merimee, was Stendhal's great- 
est pupil. Pascal had his " abyss," Stendhal 
had his fear of ennui — it was almost pathologic, 
this obsession of boredom. One side of his many- 
sided nature was akin to Pepys, a French Pepys, 
who chronicled immortal small-beer. However, 
it is his heart's history that will make this protean 
old faun eternally youthful. As a prose artist he 
does not count for much. But in the current 
of his swift, clear narrative and under the spell of 

64 



HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL 

his dry magic and peptonized concision we do 
not miss the peacock graces and coloured splen- 
dours of Flaubert or Chateaubriand. Stendhal 
delivers himself of a story rapidly; he is all sinew. 
And he is the most seductive spiller of souls, since 
Saint-Simon. 



65 



II 

THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

i 

For the sentimental no greater foe exists than 
the iconoclast who dissipates literary legends. And 
he is abroad nowadays. Those golden times when 
they gossipped of De Quincey's enormous opium 
consumption, of the gin absorbed by gentle Charles 
Lamb, of Coleridge's dark ways, Byron's escapades, 
and Shelley's atheism — alas! into what faded 
limbo have they vanished. Poe, too, Poe whom 
we saw in fancy reeling from Richmond to Balti- 
more, Baltimore to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to 
New York. Those familiar fascinating anecdotes 
have gone the way of all such jerry-built spooks. 
We now know Poe to have been a man suffering 
at the time of his death from cerebral lesion, a 
man who drank at intervals and but little. Dr. 
Guerrier of Paris has exploded a darling super- 
stition about De Quincey's opium-eating. He 
has demonstrated that no man could have lived 
so long — De Quincey was nearly seventy-five 
at his death — and worked so hard, if he had 
consumed twelve thousand drops of laudanum as 
often as he said he did. Furthermore, the Eng- 

66 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

lish essayist's description of the drug's effects is 
inexact. He was seldom sleepy — a sure sign, as- 
serts Dr. Guerrier, that he was not altogether en- 
slaved by the drug habit. Sprightly in old age, his 
powers of labour were prolonged until past three- 
score and ten. His imagination needed little 
opium to produce the famous Confessions. Even 
Gautier's revolutionary red waistcoat worn at the 
premiere of Hernani was, according to Gautier, a 
pink doublet. And Rousseau has been white- 
washed. So they are disappearing, those literary 
legends, until, disheartened, we cry out: Spare us 
our dear, old-fashioned, disreputable men of 
genius! 

But the legend of Charles Baudelaire is seem- 
ingly indestructible. This French poet himself 
has suffered more from the friendly malignant 
biographer and Parisian chroniclers than did 
Poe. Who shall keep the curs out of the 
cemetery? asked Baudelaire after he had read 
Griswold on Poe. A few years later his own 
cemetery was invaded and the world was put 
in possession of the Baudelaire legend; that leg- 
end of the atrabilious, irritable poet, dandy, 
maniac, his hair dyed green, spouting blasphemies; 
that grim, despairing image of a Diabolic, a 
libertine, saint, and drunkard. Maxime du 
Camp was much to blame for the promulgation 
of these tales — witness his Souvenirs Litt£raires. 
However, it may be confessed that part of the 
Baudelaire legend was created by Charles Baude- 
laire. In the history of literature it is difficult to 

6 7 



EGOISTS 

parallel such a deliberate piece of self-stultifica- 
tion. Not Villon, who preceded him, not Ver- 
laine, who imitated him, drew for the astonishment 
or disedification of the world like unflattering 
portraits. Mystifier as he was, he must have 
suffered at times from acute cortical irritation. 
And, notwithstanding his desperate effort to 
realize Poe's idea, he only proved Poe correct, 
who had said that no man can bare his heart 
quite naked; there will be always something held 
back, something false too ostentatiously thrust 
forward. The grimace, the attitude, the pomp 
of rhetoric are so many buffers between the soul 
of man and the sharp reality of published con- 
fessions. Baudelaire was no more exception to 
this rule than St. Augustine, Bunyan, Rousseau, 
or Huysmans; though he was as frank as any of 
them, as we may see in the recently printed diary, 
Mon coeur mis a nu (Posthumous Works, So- 
ciete du Mercure de France) ; and in the Journal, 
Fusees, Letters, and other fragments exhumed 
by devoted Baudelarians. 

To smash legends, Eugene Crepet's biographical 
study, first printed in 1887, has been republished 
with new notes by his son, Jacques Crepet. This 
is an exceedingly valuable contribution to Baude- 
laire lore; a dispassionate life, however, has yet 
to be written, a noble task for some young poet 
who will disentangle the conflicting lies originated 
by Baudelaire — that tragic comedian — from 
the truth and thus save him from himself. The 
new Crepet volume is really but a series of notes; 

68 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

there are some letters addressed to the poet by 
the distinguished men of his day, supplementing 
the rather disappointing volume of Letters, 1841- 
1866, published in 1908. There are also docu- 
ments in the legal prosecution of Baudelaire, with 
memories of him by Charles Asselineau, Leon 
Cladel, Camille Lemonnier, and others. 

In November, 1850, Maxime du Camp and 
Gustave Flaubert found themselves at the French 
Ambassador's, Constantinople. The two friends 
had taken a trip in the Orient which later bore 
fruit in Salammbo. General Aupick, the repre- 
sentative of the French Government, received the 
young men cordially; they were presented to his 
wife, Madame Aupick. She was the mother of 
Charles Baudelaire, and inquired of Du Camp, 
rather anxiously: " My son has talent, has he not ?" 
Unhappy because her second marriage, a brilliant 
one, had set her son against her, the poor woman 
welcomed from such a source confirmation of her 
eccentric boy's gifts. Du Camp tells the much- 
discussed story of a quarrel between the youthful 
Charles and his stepfather, a quarrel that began 
at table. There were guests present. After some 
words Charles bounded at the General's throat 
and sought to strangle him. He was promptly 
boxed on the ears and succumbed to a nervous 
spasm. A delightful anecdote, one that fills with 
joy psychiatrists in search of a theory of genius 
and degeneration. Charles was given some 
money and put on board a ship sailing to 
East India. He became a cattle-dealer in the 

69 



EGOISTS 

British army, and returned to France years after- 
ward with a Venus noire, to whom he addressed 
extravagant poems! All this according to Du 
Camp. Here is another tale, a comical one. 
Baudelaire visited Du Camp in Paris, and his 
hair was violently green. Du Camp said noth- 
ing. Angered by this indifference, Baudelaire 
asked: "You find nothing abnormal about me?" 
"No," was the answer. "But my hair — it is 
green!" "That is not singular, mon cher Baude- 
laire; every one has hair more or less green in 
Paris." Disappointed in not creating a sensa- 
tion, Baudelaire went to a cafe, gulped down two 
large bottles of Burgundy, and asked the waiter 
to remove the water, as water was a disagreeable 
sight for him; then he went away in a rage. It is 
a pity to doubt this green hair legend; presently 
a man of genius will not be able to enjoy an 
epileptic fit in peace — as does a banker or a 
beggar. We are told that St. Paul, Mahomet, 
Handel, Napoleon, Flaubert, Dostoievsky were 
epileptoids; yet we do not encounter men of this 
rare kind among the inmates of asylums. Even 
Baudelaire had his sane moments. 

The joke of the green hair has been disposed 
of by Crepet. Baudelaire's hair thinning after 
an illness, he had his head shaved and painted 
with salve of a green hue, hoping thereby to escape 
baldness. At the time when he had embarked 
for Calcutta (May, 1841), he was not seventeen, 
but twenty, years of age. Du Camp said he was 
seventeen when he attacked General Aupick. 

70 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

The dinner could not have taken place at Lyons 
because the Aupick family had left that city six 
years before the date given by Du Camp. Charles 
was provided with five thousand francs for his 
expenses, instead of twenty — Du Camp's ver- 
sion — and he never was a beef-drover in the 
British army, for a good reason — he never reached 
India. Instead, he disembarked at the Isle 
of Bourbon, and after a short stay was seized by 
homesickness and returned to France, being ab- 
sent about ten months. But, like Flaubert, on 
his return home Baudelaire was seized with the 
nostalgia of the East; out there he had yearned 
for Paris. Jules Claretie recalls Baudelaire say- 
ing to him with a grimace: "I love Wagner; but 
the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by his 
tail outside of a window, and trying to stick to the 
panes of glass with its claws. There is an odd 
grating on the glass which I find at the same time 
strange, irritating, and singularly harmonious." 
Is it necessary to add that Baudelaire, notorious 
in Paris for his love of cats, dedicating poems to 
cats, would never have perpetrated such revolting 
cruelty ? 

Another misconception, a critical one, is the 
case of Poe and Baudelaire. The young French- 
man first became infatuated with Poe's writings 
in 1846 or 1847 — he gives these two dates, though 
several stories of Poe had been translated into 
French as early as 1841 or 1842; L'Orang-Outang 
was the first, which we know as The Murders in 
the Rue Morgue; Madame Meunier also adapted 

7i 



EGOISTS 

several Poe stories for the reviews. Baudelaire's 
labours as a translator lasted over ten years. 
That he assimilated Poe, that he idolized Poe, is 
a commonplace of literary gossip. But that Poe 
had overwhelming influence in the formation of 
his poetic genius is not the truth. Yet we find 
such an acute critic as the late Edmund Clarence 
Stedman writing, "Poe's chief influence upon 
Baudelaire's own production relates to poetry." 
It is precisely the reverse. Poe's influence affected 
Baudelaire's prose, notably in the disjointed con- 
fessions, Mon coeur mis a nu, which recall the 
American writer's Marginalia. The bulk of the 
poetry in Les Fleurs de Mai was written before 
Baudelaire had read Poe, though not published 
in book form until 1857. But in 1855 some of 
the poems saw the light in the Revue des deux 
Mondes, while many of them had been put forth 
a decade or fifteen years before as fugitive verse 
in various magazines. Stedman was not the first 
to make this mistake. In Bayard Taylor's The 
Echo Club we find on page 24 this criticism: 
" There was a congenital twist about Poe. . . . 
Baudelaire and Swinburne after him have been 
trying to surpass him by increasing the dose; but 
his muse is the natural Pythia, inheriting her con- 
vulsions, while they eat all sorts of insane roots 
to produce theirs." This must have been written 
about 1872, and after reading it one would fancy 
Poe and Baudelaire were rhapsodic wrigglers 
on the poetic tripod, whereas their poetry is 
often reserved, even glacial. Baudelaire, like 

72 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

Poe, sometimes " built his nests with the birds 
of Night," and that was enough to condemn the 
work of both men with critics of the didactic 
school. 

1 Once, when Baudelaire heard that an American 
man-of-letters (♦?) was in Paris, he secured an 
introduction and called. Eagerly inquiring after 
Poe, he learned that he was not considered a 
genteel person in America. Baudelaire with- 
drew, muttering maledictions. Enthusiastic poet! 
Charming literary person! But the American, 
whoever he was, represented public opinion at 
the time. To-day criticisms of Poe are vitiated 
by the desire to make him an angel. It is to be 
doubted whether without his barren environ- 
ment and hard fortunes we should have had 
Poe at all. He had to dig down deeper into the 
pit of his personality to reach the central core of his 
music. But every ardent young soul entering 
"literature" begins by a vindication of Poe's 
character. Poe was a man, and he is now a classic. 
He was a half-charlatan as was Baudelaire. In 
both the sublime and the sickly were never far 
asunder. The pair loved to mystify, to play 
pranks on their contemporaries. Both were im- 
placable pessimists. Both were educated in 
affluence, and both had to face unprepared the 
hardships of life. The hastiest comparison of 
their poetic work will show that their only common 
ideal was the worship of an exotic beauty. Their 
artistic methods of expression were totally dis- 
similar. Baudelaire, like Poe, had a harp-like 

73 



EGOISTS 

temperament which vibrated in the presence of 
strange subjects. Above all he was obsessed by 
sex. Woman, as angel of destruction, is the key- 
note of his poems. Poe was almost sexless. His 
aerial creatures never footed the dusty highways 
of the world. His lovely lines, "Helen, thy 
beauty is to me," could never have been written 
by Baudelaire; while Poe would never have 
pardoned the "fulgurant" grandeur, the Bee- 
thoven-like harmonies, the Dantesque horrors 
of that "deep wide music of lost souls" in 
"Femmes Damnees": 

Descendez, descendez, lamentables victimes. 

Or this, which might serve as a text for one of 
John Martin's vast sinister mezzotints: 

J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un theatre banal 
Qu'enflammait Porchestre sonore, 
Une fee allumer dans un del infernal 
Une miraculeuse aurore; 

J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un theatre banal 

Un etre, qui n'etait que lumiere, or et gaze, 

Terrasser Penorme Satan; 

Mais mon cceur que jamais ne visite Pextase, 

Est un theatre ou Pon attend 

Toujours, toujours en vain PEtre aux ailes de gaze. 

Professor Saintsbury thus sums up the differ- 
ences between Poe and Baudelaire: "Both au- 
thors — Poe and De Quincey — fell short of 
Baudelaire himself as regards depth and fulness 

74 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

of passion, but both have a superficial likeness 
to him in eccentricity of temperament and af- 
fection for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque 
and horror.' ' Poe is without passion, except a 
passion for the macabre; for what Huysmans calls 
"The October of the sensations"; whereas, there 
is a gulf of despair and terror and humanity in 
Baudelaire which shakes your nerves yet stimu- 
lates the imagination. However, profounder as 
a poet, he was no match for Poe in what might 
be termed intellectual prestidigitation. The math- 
ematical Poe, the Poe of the ingenious detective 
tales, tales extraordinary, the Poe of the swift 
flights into the cosmical blue, the Poe the prophet 
and mystic — in these the American was more 
versatile than his French translator. That 
Baudelaire said, "Evil, be thou my good," 
is doubtless true. He proved all things and 
found them vanity. He is the poet of original 
sin, a worshipper of Satan for the sake of para- 
dox; his Litanies to Satan ring childish to us — 
in his heart he was a believer. His was "an in- 
finite reverse aspiration," and mixed up with his 
pose was a disgust for vice, for life itself. He 
was the last of the Romanticists; Sainte-Beuve 
called him the Kamtschatka of Romanticism; its 
remotest hyperborean peak. Romanticism is dead 
to-day, as dead as Naturalism; but Baudelaire is 
alive, and is read. His glistening phosphorescent 
trail is over French poetry and he is the begetter 
of a school: — Verlaine, Villiers de ITsle Adam,* 
Carducci, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue; 

75 



EGOISTS 

Verhaeren, and many of the youthful crew. He 
affected Swinburne, and in Huysmans, who was 
not a poet, his splenetic spirit lives. Baudelaire's 
motto might be the opposite of Browning's lines: 
"The Devil is in heaven. All's wrong with the 
world." 

When Goethe said of Hugo and the Romanti- 
cists that they all came from Chateaubriand, he 
should have substituted the name of Rousseau — 
"Romanticism, it is Rousseau," exclaims Pierre 
Lasserre. But there is more of Byron and Petrus 
Borel — a forgotten mad poet — in Baudelaire; 
though, for a brief period, in 1848, he became a 
Rousseau reactionary, sported the workingman's 
blouse, shaved his head, shouldered a musket, 
went to the barricades, wrote inflammatory edi- 
torials calling the proletarian " Brother!" (oh, 
Baudelaire!) and, as the Goncourts recorded in 
their diary, had the head of a maniac. How seri- 
ously we may take this swing of the pendulum is 
to be noted in a speech of the poet's at the time 
of the Revolution: "Come," he said, "let us go 
shoot General Aupick!" It was his stepfather 
that he thought of, not the eternal principles of 
Liberty. This may be a false anecdote; many 
were foisted upon Baudelaire. For example, 
his exclamations at cafes or in public places, 
such as: "Have you ever eaten a baby? I 
find it pleasing to the palate!" or, "The night 
I killed my father!" Naturally people stared 
and Baudelaire was happy — he had startled the 
bourgeois. The cannibalistic idea he may have 

76 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

borrowed from Swift's amusing pamphlet, for 
this French poet knew English literature. 

Gautier compares the poems to a certain 
tale of Hawthorne's in which there is a garden of 
poisoned flowers. But Hawthorne worked in 
his laboratory of evil wearing mask and gloves; 
he never descended into the mud and sin of the 
street. Baudelaire ruined his health, smudged 
his soul, yet remained withal, as Anatole France 
says, "a divine poet." How childish, yet how 
touching is his resolution — he wrote in his diary 
of prayer's dynamic force — when he was penni- 
less, in debt, threatened with imprisonment, sick, 
nauseated with sin: "To make every morning 
my prayer to God, the reservoir of all force, and 
all justice; to my father, to Mariette, and to Poe 
as intercessors." (Evidently, Maurice Barres 
encountered here his theory of Intercessors.) 
Baudelaire loved the memory of his father as 
much as Stendhal hated his. His mother he 
became reconciled with after the death of General 
Aupick, in 1857. He felt in 1862 that his own 
intellectual eclipse was approaching, for he 
wrote: "I have cultivated my hysteria with joy 
and terror. To-day imbecility's wing fanned me 
as it passed." The sense of the vertiginous gulf 
was abiding with him; read his poem, "Pascal 
avait son gouffre." 

In preferring the Baudelaire translations of 
Poe to the original — and they give the impression 
of being original works — Stedman agreed with 
Asselineau that the French is more concise than 

77 



EGOISTS 

the English. The prose of Poe and Baudelaire 
is clear, sober, rhythmic; Baudelaire's is more 
lapidary, finer in contour, richer coloured, more 
supple, though without the " honey and tiger's 
blood" of Barbey d'Aurevilly's. Baudelaire's 
soul was patiently built up as a fabulous bird 
might build its nest — bits of straw, the sobbing 
of women, clay, cascades of black stars, rags, 
leaves, rotten wood, corroding dreams, a spray 
of roses, a sparkle of pebble, a gleam of blue sky, 
arabesques of incense and verdigris, despairing 
hearts and music and the abomination of desolation 
for ground- tones. But this soul-nest is also a ceme- 
tery of the seven sorrows. He loved the clouds 
. . . . les nuages . . . la has. ... It was la bas 
with him even in the tortures of his wretched love- 
life. Corruption and death were ever floating in his 
consciousness. He was like Flaubert, who saw 
everywhere the hidden skeleton. Felicien Rops 
has best interpreted Baudelaire: the etcher and 
poet were closely knit spirits. Rodin, too, is a 
Baudelarian. If there could be such an anomaly 
as a native wood-note evil, it would be the lyric 
and astringent voice of this poet. His sensibility 
was both catholic and morbid, though he could be 
frigid in the face of the most disconcerting mis- 
fortunes. He was a man for whom the visible 
word existed; if Gautier was pagan, Baudelaire 
was a strayed spirit from mediaeval days. The 
spirit ruled, and, as Paul Bourget said, "he saw 
God." A Manichean in his worship of evil, he 
nevertheless abased his soul: "Oh! Lord God! 

7 8 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

Give me the force and courage to contemplate my 
heart and my body without disgust," he prays: 
But as some one remarked to Rochefoucauld, 
"Where you end, Christianity begins." 

Baudelaire built his ivory tower on the borders 
of a poetic Maremma, which every miasma of 
the spirit pervaded, every marsh-light and glow- 
worm inhabited. Like Wagner, Baudelaire paint- 
ed in his sultry music the profundities of abysms, 
the vastness of space. He painted, too, the great 
nocturnal silences of the soul. 

Pacem summam tenent! He never reached 
peace on the heights. Let us admit that souls of 
his kind are encased in sick frames; their steel is too 
shrewd for the scabbard; yet the enigma for us 
is none the less unfathomable. Existence for 
such natures is a sort of muffled delirium. To 
affiliate him with Poe, De Quincey, Hoffmann, 
James Thomson, Coleridge, and the rest of the 
sombre choir does not explain him; he is, perhaps, 
nearer Donne and Villon than any of the others 
— strains of the metaphysical and sinister and 
supersubtle are to be discovered in him. The 
disharmony of brain and body, the spiritual bi- 
location, are only too easy to diagnose; but the 
remedy ? Hypocrite lecteur — mon semblable — 
monfrere! When the subtlety, force, grandeur, 
of his poetic production be considered, together 
with its disquieting, nervous, vibrating qualities, it 
is not surprising that Victor Hugo wrote to the 
poet: "You invest the heaven of art with we know 
not what deadly rays; you create a new shudder." 

79 



EGOISTS 

Hugo could have said that he turned Art into an 
Inferno. Baudelaire is the evil archangel of 
poetry. In his heaven of fire, glass, and ebony 
he is the blazing Lucifer. "A glorious devil, 
large in heart and brain, that did love beauty 
only . . ." sang Tennyson. 



II 



As long ago as 1869 and in our " barbarous gas- 
lit country/' as Baudelaire named the land of 
Poe, an unsigned review appeared in which this 
poet was described as " unique and as interesting 
as Hamlet. He is that rare and unknown being, 
a genuine poet — a poet in the midst of things 
that have disordered his spirit — a poet excessively 
developed in his taste for and by beauty . . . very 
responsive to the ideal, very greedy of sensation.' ' 
A better description of Baudelaire does not exist. 
The Hamlet-motive, particularly, is one that 
sounded throughout the disordered symphony of 
the poet's life. 

He was, later, revealed to American readers 
by Henry James. This was in 1878, when ap- 
peared the first edition of French Poets and 
Novelists. Previous to that there had been some 
desultory discussion, a few essays in the maga- 
zines, and in 1875 a sympathetic paper by Pro- 
fessor James Albert Harrison of the University 
of Virginia. But Mr. James had the ear of a 
cultured public. He denounced the Frenchman 
for his reprehensible taste, though he did not 

80 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

mention his beautiful verse or his originality in 
the matter of criticism. Baudelaire, in his eyes, 
was not only immoral, but he had, with the ap- 
probation of Sainte-Beuve, introduced Poe as a 
great man to the French nation. (See Baudelaire's 
letter to Sainte-Beuve in the newly published 
Letters, 1841-1866.) Perhaps Mr. Dick Minim 
and his projected Academy of Criticism might 
make clear these devious problems. 

The Etudes Critiques of Edmond Scherer 
were collected in 1863. In them we find this 
unhappy, uncritical judgment: " Baudelaire, lui, 
n'a rien, ni le coeur, ni P esprit, ni Pidee, ni le mot, 
ni la raison, ni la fantaisie, ni la verve, ni meme 
la facture . . . son unique titre c'est d' avoir con- 
tribue a creer Pesthetique de la debauche." It is 
not our intention to dilate upon the injustice of 
this criticism. It is Baudelaire the critic of 
aesthetics in whom we are interested. Yet I 
cannot forbear saying that if all the negations of 
Scherer had been transformed into affirmations, 
only justice would have been accorded Baudelaire, 
who was not alone a poet, the most original of his 
century, but also a critic of the first rank, one 
who welcomed Richard Wagner when Paris hooted 
him and his fellow composer, Hector Berlioz, 
played the role of the envious; one who fought for 
Edouard Manet, Leconte de Lisle, Gustave 
Flaubert, Eugene Delacroix; fought with pen for 
the modern etchers, illustrators, Meryon, Dau- 
mier, Felicien, Rops, Gavarni, and Constantin 
Guys. He literally identified himself with De 



EGOISTS 

Quincey and Poe, translating them so wonder- 
fully well that some unpatriotic critics like the 
French better than the originals. So much was 
Baudelaire absorbed in Poe that a writer of his 
times asserted the translator would meet the same 
fate as the American poet. A singular, vigorous 
spirit is Baudelaire's, whose poetry with its "icy 
ecstasy" is profound and harmonic, whose criti- 
cism is penetrated by a catholic quality, who antici- 
pated modern critics in his abhorrence of schools 
and environments, preferring to isolate the man 
and study him uniquely. He would have sub- 
scribed to Swinburne's generous pronouncement: 
"I have never been able to see what should at- 
tract man to the profession of criticism but the 
noble pleasure of praising." The Frenchman 
has said that it would be impossible for a critic 
to become a poet; and it is impossible for a poet 
not to contain a critic. 

Theophile Gautier's study prefixed to the 
definitive edition of Les Fleurs du Mai is not only 
the most sympathetic exposition of Baudelaire as 
man and genius, but it is also the high-water mark 
of Gautier's gifts as an essayist. We learn therein 
how the young Charles, an incorrigible dandy, 
came to visit Hotel Pimodan about 1844. In this 
Hotel Pimodan a dilettante, Ferdinand Boissard, 
held high revel. His fantastically decorated 
apartments were frequented by the painters, 
poets, sculptors, romancers, of the day — that is, 
carefully selected ones such as Liszt, George Sand, 
Merimee, and others whose verve or genius gave 

82 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

them the privilege of saying Open Sesame! to 
this cave of forty Supermen. Balzac has in 
his Peau de Chagrin pictured the same sort of 
scenes that were supposed to occur weekly at the 
Pimodan. Gautier eloquently describes the meet- 
ing of these kindred artistic souls, where the 
beautiful Jewess Maryx, who had posed for 
Ary Scheffer's Mignon and for Paul Delaroche's 
La Gloire, met the superb Mme. Sabatier, the 
only woman that Baudelaire loved, and the original 
of that extraordinary group of Clesinger's — the 
sculptor and son-in-law of George Sand — la 
Femme au Serpent, a Salammbo a la mode in 
marble. Hasheesh was eaten, so Gautier writes, 
by Boissard and by Baudelaire. As for the cre- 
ator of Mademoiselle Maupin, he was too robust 
for such nonsense. He had to work for his living 
at journalism, and he died in harness an irre- 
proachable father, while the unhappy Baudelaire, 
the inheritor of an intense, unstable temperament, 
soon devoured his patrimony of 75,000 francs and 
for the remaining years of his life was between 
the devil of his dusky Jenny Duval and the deep 
sea of debt. 

It was at these Pimodan gatherings, which were 
no doubt much less wicked than the participants 
would have us believe, that Baudelaire encountered 
Emile Deroy, a painter of skill, who made his por- 
trait, and encouraged the fashionable young fel- 
low to continue his art studies. We have seen 
an album containing sketches by the poet. They 
betray talent of about the same order as Thack- 

83 



EGOISTS 

eray's, with a superadded note of the horrific — 
that favourite epithet of the early Poe critics. 
Baudelaire admired Thackeray, and when the 
Englishman praised the illustrations of Guys, 
he was delighted. Deroy taught his pupil the 
commonplaces of a painter's technique; also how 
to compose a palette — a rather meaningless 
phrase nowadays. At least he did not write 
of the arts without some technical experience. 
Delacroix took up his enthusiastic disciple, and 
when the Salons of Baudelaire appeared in 1845, 
1846, 1855, and 1859, the praise and blame they 
evoked were testimonies to the training and knowl- 
edge of their author. A new spirit had been born. 
The names of Diderot and Baudelaire were 
coupled. Neither academic nor spouting the 
jargon of the usual critic, the Salons of Baudelaire 
are the production of a humanist. Some would 
put them above Diderot's. Mr. Saintsbury, 
after Mr. Swinburne the warmest advocate of 
Baudelaire among the English, thinks that the 
French poet in his picture criticism observed too 
little and imagined too much. "In other words," 
he adds, "to read a criticism of Baudelaire's with- 
out the title affixed is by no means a sure method 
of recognizing the picture afterward." Now, 
word-painting was the very thing that Baudelaire 
avoided. It was his friend Gautier, with the 
plastic style, who attempted the well-nigh impossi- 
ble feat of competing in his verbal descriptions 
with the certitudes of canvas and marble. And 
if he with his verbal imagination did not entirely 

84 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

succeed, how could a less adept manipulator of 
the vocabulary? We do not agree with Mr. 
Saintsbury. No one can imagine too much when 
the imagination is that of a poet. Baudelaire 
divined the work of the artist and set it down 
scrupulously in prose of rectitude. He did not 
paint pictures in prose. He did not divagate. He 
did not overburden his pages with technical terms. 
But the spirit he did disengage in a few swift 
phrases. The polemics of historical schools were 
a cross for him to bear, and he bore all his learn- 
ing lightly. Like a true critic, he judged more 
by form than theme. There are no types; there 
is only life, he had cried before Jules Laforgue. 
He was ever for art-for-art, yet, having breadth 
of comprehension and a Heine-like capacity for 
seeing both sides of his own nature and its idio- 
syncrasies, he could write: "The puerile Utopia 
of the school of art for art, in excluding morality, 
and often even passion, was necessarily sterile. 
All literature which refuses to advance fraternally 
between science and philosophy is a homicidal 
and a suicidal literature." 

Baudelaire, then, was no less sound a critic of 
the plastic arts than of music and literature. Like 
his friend Flaubert, he had a horror of democracy, 
of the democratisation of the arts, of all the senti- 
mental fuss and fuddle of a pseudo-humanitarian- 
ism. During the 1848 agitation the former 
dandy of 1840 put on a blouse and spoke of barri- 
cades. These things were in the air. Wagner 
rang the alarm-bells during the Dresden uprising. 

85 



EGOISTS 

Chopin wrote for the pianoforte a revolutionary 
etude. Brave lads! Poets and musicians fight 
their battles best in the region of the ideal. Baude- 
laire's little attack of the equality-measles soon 
vanished. He lectured his brother poets and 
artists on the folly and injustice of abusing or de- 
spising the bourgeois (being a man of paradoxes, 
he dedicated a volume of. his Salons to the bour- 
geois), but he would not have contradicted Mr. 
George Moore for declaring that " in art the demo- 
crat is always reactionary. In 1830 the demo- 
crats were against Victor Hugo and Delacroix." 
And Les Fleurs du Mai, that book of opals, blood, 
and evil swamp-flowers, can never be savoured 
by the mob. 

In his Souvenirs de Jeunesse, Champfleury 
speaks of the promenades in the Louvre he en- 
joyed in company w T ith Baudelaire. Bronzino 
was one of the latter' s preferences. He was also 
attracted to El Greco — not an unnatural ad- 
miration, considering the sombre extravagance 
of his own genius. Goya he has written of in 
exalted phrases. Velasquez was his touchstone. 
Being of a perverse nature, his nerves ruined by 
abuse of drink and drugs, the landscapes of his 
imagination or those by his friend Rousseau were 
more beautiful than Nature herself. The coun- 
try, he declared, was odious. Like Whistler, 
whom he often met — see the Hommage a Dela- 
croix by Fantin-Latour, with its portraits of 
Whistler, Baudelaire, Manet, Bracquemond the 
etcher, Legros, Delacroix, Cordier, Duranty the 

86 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

critic, and De Balleroy — he could not help show- 
ing his aversion to " foolish sunsets." In a word, 
Baudelaire, into whose brain had entered too 
much moonlight, was the father of a lunar school 
of poetry, criticism and fiction. His Samuel 
Cramer, in La Fanfarlo, is the literary progenitor 
of Jean, Due d'Esseintes, of Huysmans's A 
Rebours. Huysmans modelled at first himself on 
Baudelaire. His Le Drageoir aux Epices is a 
continuation of Petits Poemes en Prose. And to 
Baudelaire's account must be laid much artificial 
morbid writing. Despite- his pursuit of perfection 
in form, his influence has been too often baneful to 
impressionable artists in embryo. A lover of 
Gallic Byronism, and high-priest of the Satanic 
school, there was no extravagance, absurd or terri- 
ble, that he did not commit, from etching a four- 
part fugue on ice to skating hymns in honour of 
Lucifer. In his criticism alone was he the sane, 
logical Frenchman. And while he did not live to 
see the success of the Impressionist group, he 
would have surely acclaimed their theories and 
practice. Was he not an impressionist himself? 
As Richard Wagner was his god in music, so 
Delacroix quite overflowed his aesthetic conscious- 
ness. Read Volume II. of his collected works, 
Curiosities Esthetiques, which contains his Salons; 
also his essay, De 1' Essence du Rire (worthy to be 
placed side by side with George Meredith's es- 
say on Comedy). Caricaturists, French and 
foreign, are considered in two chapters at the close 
of the volume. Baudelaire was as conscientious 

87 



& 



EGOISTS 

as Gautier. He toiled around miles of mediocre 
canvas, saying an encouraging word to the less 
talented, boiling over with holy indignation, 
glacial irony, before the rash usurpers occupying 
the seats of the mighty, and pouncing on new 
genius with promptitude. Upon Delacroix he 
lavished the largesse of his admiration. He 
smiled at the platitudes of Horace Vernet, and 
only shook his head over the Schnetzes and other 
artisans of the day. He welcomed William 
Hausoullier, now so little known. He praised 
Deveria, Chasseriau — who waited years before 
he came into his own; his preferred landscapists 
were Corot, Rousseau and Troyon. He im- 
politely spoke of Ary Scheffer and the "apes of 
sentiment"; while his discussions of Hogarth, 
Cruikshank, Pinelli and Breughel proclaim his 
versatility of vision. In his essay Le Peintre de 
la Vie Moderne he was the first among critics to 
recognize the peculiar quality named " modernity," 
that nervous, naked vibration which informs the 
novels of Goncourt, Flaubert's L' Education Senti- 
mentale, and the pictures of Manet, Monet, 
Degas and Raffaelli with their evocations of a 
new, nervous Paris. It is in his Volume III., en- 
titled, L'Art Romantique, that so many things 
dear to the new century were then subjects of furi- 
ous quarrels. This book contains much just and 
brilliant writing. It was easy for Nietzsche to 
praise Wagner in Germany in 1876, but dangerous 
at Paris in 186 1 to declare war on Wagner's critics. 
This Baudelaire did. 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

The relations of Baudelaire and Edouard 
Manet were exceedingly cordial. In a letter to 
Theophile Thore, the art critic (Letters, p. 361), 
we find Baudelaire defending his friend from the 
accusation that his pictures were pastiches of 
Goya. He wrote: " Manet has never seen Goya, 
never El Greco; he was never in the Pourtales 
Gallery.' ' Which may have been true at the 
time, 1864, but Manet visited Madrid and spent 
much time studying Velasquez and abusing Span- 
ish cookery. (Consider, too, Goya's Balcony with 
Girls and Manet's famous Balcony.) Raging at 
the charge of imitation, Baudelaire said in this 
same epistle: "They accuse even me of imitating 
Edgar Poe. . . . Do you know why I so patiently 
translated Poe? Because he resembled tne." The 
poet italicised these words. With stupefaction, 
therefore, he admired the mysterious coincidences 
of Manet's work with that of Goya and El Greco. 

He took Manet seriously. He wrote to him in 
a paternal and severe tone. Recall his reproof 
when urging the painter to exhibit his work. 
"You complain about attacks, but are you the 
first to endure them? Have you more genius 
than Chateaubriand and Wagner? They were 
not killed by derision. And in order not to make 
you too proud I must tell you that they are models, 
each in his way, and in a very rich world, while 
you are only the first in the decrepitude of your 
art." (Letters, p. 436.) 

Would Baudelaire recall these prophetic words 
if he were able to revisit the glimpses of the 

89 



EGOISTS 

Champs Elysees at the autumn Salons? What 
would he think of Cesanne? Odilon Redon he 
would understand, for he is the transposer of 
Baudelairianism to terms of design and colour. 
And perhaps the poet whose verse is saturated 
with tropical hues — he, when young, sailed in 
southern seas — might appreciate the monstrous 
debauch of form and colour in the Tahitian can- 
vases of Paul Gauguin. 

Baudelaire's preoccupation with pictorial themes 
may be noted in his verse. He is par excellence 
the poet of aesthetics. To Daumier he inscribed 
a poem; and to the sculptor Ernest Christophe, 
to Delacroix (Sur Le Tasse en Prison), to 
Manet, to Guys (Reve Parisien), to an un- 
known master (Une Martyre); and Watteau, a 
Watteau a rebours, is seen in Un Voyage a Cythere; 
while in Les Phares this poet of ideal, spleen, 
music, and perfume shows his adoration for Rubens, 
Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Rembrandt, 
Puget, Goya, Delacroix — " Delacroix, lac de 
sang hante des mauvais anges." And what could 
be more exquisite than his quatrain to Lola de 
Valence, a poetic inscription for the picture of 
Edouard Manet, with its last line as vaporous, 
as subtle as Verlaine: Le charme inattendu d'un 
bijou rose et noir! Heine called himself the last 
of the Romantics. The first of the " Moderns' ' 
and the last of the Romantics was the many- 
sided Charles Baudelaire. 



90 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 



III 



He was born at Paris April 9, 182 1 (Flaubert's 
birth year), and not April 21st as Gautier has it. 
His father was Joseph Francis Baudelaire, or 
Beaudelaire, who occupied a government posi- 
tion. A cultivated art lover, his taste was ap- 
parent in the home he made for his second wife, 
Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays, an orphan and 
the daughter of a military officer. There was a 
considerable difference in the years of this pair; 
the mother was twenty-seven, the father sixty-two, 
at the birth of their only child. By his first mar- 
riage the elder Baudelaire had one son, Claude, 
who, like his half-brother Charles, died of paral- 
ysis, though a steady man of business. That great 
neurosis, called Commerce, has its mental wrecks, 
too, but no one pays attention; only when the 
poet falls by the wayside is the chase begun by 
neurologists and other soul-hunters seeking for 
victims. After the death of Baudelaire's father, 
the widow, within a year, married the handsome, 
ambitious Aupick, then chef de bataillon, lieu- 
tenant-colonel, decorated with the Legion of 
Honour, and later general and ambassador to 
Madrid, Constantinople, and London. Charles 
was a nervous, frail youth, but unlike most chil- 
dren of genius, he was a scholar and won brilliant 
honours at school. His step-father w T as proud of 
him. From the Royal College of Lyons, Charles 
went to the Lycee Louis-le- Grand, Paris, but was 

9 1 



EGOISTS 

expelled in 1839. Troubles soon oegan at home 
for him. He was irascible, vain, very precocious; 
and given to dissipation. He quarrelled with 
General Aupick, and disdained his mother. But 
she was to blame, she has confessed; she had quite 
forgotten the boy in the flush of her second love. 
He could not forget, or forgive what he called her 
infidelity to the memory of his father. Hamlet- 
like, he was inconsolable. The good bishop of 
Montpellier, who knew the family, said that 
Charles was a little crazy — second marriages 
usually bring woe in their train. "When a 
mother has such a son, she doesn't remarry," 
said the young poet. Charles signed himself 
Baudelaire-Dufays, or sometimes, Dufais. He 
wrote in his journal: "My ancestors, idiots or 
maniacs ... all victims of terrible passions"; 
which was one of his exaggerations. His grand- 
father on the paternal side was a Champenois 
peasant, his mother's family presumably Nor- 
man, but not much is known of her forbears. 
Charles believed himself lost from the time his 
half-brother was stricken. He also believed that 
his instability of temperament — and he studied 
his "case" as would a surgeon — was the result 
of his parents' disparity in years. 

After his return from the East, where he did 
not learn English, as has been said — his mother 
taught him as a boy to converse in and write the 
language — he came into his little inheritance, 
about fifteen thousand dollars. Two years later 
he was so heavily in debt that his family asked 

92 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

for a guardian on the ground of incompetency. 
He had been swindled, being young and green. 
How had he squandered his money ? Not exactly 
on opera-glasses, like Gerard de Nerval, but on 
clothes, pictures, furniture, books. The rem- 
nant was set aside to pay his debts. Charles 
would be both poet and dandy. He dressed ex- 
pensively but soberly, in the English fashion; his 
linen dazzling, the prevailing hue of his habili- 
ments black. In height he was medium, his 
eyes brown, searching, luminous, the eye of a 
nyctalops, " eyes like ravens' " ; nostrils palpitating, 
cleft chin, mouth expressive, sensual, the jaw 
strong and square. His hair was black, curly, and 
glossy, his forehead high, square, white. In the 
Deroy portrait he wears a beard; he is there, what 
Catulle Mendes nicknamed him: His Excellence, 
Monseigneur Brummel! Later he was the elegiac 
Satan, the author of LTmitation de N. S. le 
Diable; or the Baudelaire of George Moore: "the 
clean-shaven face of the mock priest, the slow 
cold eyes and the sharp cunning sneer of the cyni- 
cal libertine who will be tempted that he may 
better know the worthlessness of temptation.' ' 
In the heyday of his blood he was perverse and 
deliberate. Let us credit him with contradicting 
the Byronic notion that ennui could be best cured 
by dissipation; in sin Baudelaire found the sad- 
dest of all tasks. Mendes laughs at the legend 
of Baudelaire's violence, of his being given to 
explosive phrases. Despite Gautier's stories about 
the Hotel Pimadon and its club of hasheesh- 

93 



EGOISTS 

eaters, M. Mendes denies that Baudelaire was a 
victim of the hemp. What the majority of man- 
kind does not know concerning the habits of liter- 
ary workers is this prime fact : men who work hard, 
writing verse — and there is no mental toil com- 
parable to it — cannot drink, or indulge in opium, 
without the inevitable collapse. The old-fashioned 
ideas of " inspiration," spontaneity, easy impro- 
visation, the sudden bolt from heaven, are de- 
lusions still hugged by the world. To be told 
that Chopin filed at his music for years, that Bee- 
thoven in his smithy forged his thunderbolts, that 
Manet toiled like a labourer on the dock, that 
Baudelaire was a mechanic in his devotion to 
poetic work, that Gautier was a hard-working 
journalist, is a disillusion for the sentimental. 
Minerva springing full-fledged from Jupiter's 
skull to the desk of the poet is a pretty fancy; but 
Balzac and Flaubert did not encourage this fancy. 
Work literally killed Poe, as it killed Jules de 
Goncourt, Flaubert, and Daudet. Maupassant 
went insane because he would work and he would 
play the same day. Baudelaire worked and wor- 
ried. His debts haunted him his life long. His 
constitution was flawed — Sainte-Beuve told him 
that he had worn out his nerves — from the start, 
he was detraque; but that his entire life was one 
huge debauch is a nightmare of the moral po- 
lice in some white cotton night-cap country. 

His period of mental production was not brief 
or barren. He was a student. Du Camp's 
charge that he was an ignorant man is disproved 

94 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

by the variety and quality of his published work. 
His range of sympathies was large. His mistake, 
in the eyes of his colleagues, was to write so well 
about the seven arts. Versatility is seldom given 
its real name — which is protracted labour. 
Baudelaire was one of the elect, an aristocrat, 
who dealt with the quintessence of art; his delicate 
air of a bishop, his exquisite manners, his modu- 
lated voice, aroused unusual interest and admira- 
tion. He was a humanist of distinction; he has 
left a hymn to Saint Francis in the Latin of the 
decadence. Baudelaire, like Chopin, made more 
poignant the phrase, raised to a higher intensity 
the expressiveness of art. 

Women played a commanding role in his life. 
They always do with any poet worthy of the name, 
though few have been so frank in acknowledging 
this as Baudelaire. Yet he was in love more with 
Woman than the individual. The legend of the 
beautiful creature he brought from the East re- 
solves itself into the dismal affair with Jeanne 
Duval. He met her in Paris, after he had been 
in the East. She sang at a cafe-concert in Paris. 
She was more brown than black. She was not 
handsome, not intelligent, not good; yet he. ideal- 
ized her, for she was the source of half his inspira- 
tion. To her were addressed those marvellous 
evocations of the Orient, of perfume, tresses, de- 
licious mornings on strange far-away seas and 
"superb Byzant" domes that devils built. Baude- 
laire is the poet of perfumes; he is also the patron 
saint of ennui. No one has so chanted the praise 

95 



EGOISTS 

of odours. His soul swims on perfume as do other 
souls on music, he has sung. As he grew older 
he seemed to hunt for more acrid odours; he often 
presents an elaborately chased vase the carving of 
which transports us, but from which the head is 
quickly averted. Jeanne, whom he never loved, 
no matter what may be said, was a sorceress. 
But she was impossible; she robbed, betrayed him; 
he left her a dozen times only to return. He was 
a capital draughtsman with a strong nervous line 
and made many pen-and-ink drawings of her. 
They are not prepossessing. In her rapid decline, 
she was not allowed to want; Madame Aupick 
paying her expenses in the hospital. A sordid 
history. She was a veritable flower of evil for 
Baudelaire. Yet poetry, like music, would be 
colourless, scentless, if it sounded no dissonances. 
Fancy art reduced to the beatific and banal chord 
of C major! 

He fell in love with the celebrated Madame 
Sabatier, a reigning beauty, at whose salon artistic 
Paris assembled. She had been christened by 
Gautier Madame la Presidente, and her sumptuous 
beauty was portrayed by Ricard in his La Femme 
au Chien. She returned Baudelaire's love. They 
soon parted. Again a riddle that the published 
letters hardly solve. One letter, however, does 
show that Baudelaire had tried to be faithful, 
and failed. He could not extort from his ex- 
hausted soul the sentiment; but he put its music 
on paper. His most seductive lyrics were ad- 
dressed to Madame Sabatier: "A la tres chfere, 

9 6 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

k la trks-belle," a hymn saturated with love. 
Music, spleen, perfumes — " colour, sound, per- 
fumes call to each other as deep to deep; perfumes 
like the flesh of children, soft as hautboys, green 
like the meadows'' — criminals, outcasts, the 
charm of childhood, the horrors of love, pride, and 
rebellion, Eastern landscapes, cats, soothing and 
false; cats, the true companions of lonely poets; 
haunted clocks, shivering dusks, and gloomier 
dawns — Paris in a hundred phases — these and 
many other themes this strange-souled poet, this 
" Dante, pacer of the shore," of Paris has cele- 
brated in finely wrought verse and profound 
phrases. In a single line he contrives atmos- 
phere; the very shape of his sentence, the ring of 
the syllables, arouses the deepest emotion. A 
master of harmonic undertones is Baudelaire. His 
successors have excelled him in making their music 
more fluid, more singing, more vapourous — all 
young French poets pass through their Baude- 
larian green-sickness — but he alone knows the 
secrets of moulding those metallic, free sonnets, 
which have the resistance of bronze; and of the 
despairing music that flames from the mouths of 
lost souls trembling on the wharves of hell. He 
is the supreme master of irony and troubled 
voluptuousness. 

Baudelaire is a masculine poet. He carved 
rather than sang; the plastic arts spoke to his 
soul. A lover and maker of images. Like Poe, 
his emotions transformed themselves into ideas. 
Bourget classified him as mystic, libertine, and 

97 



EGOISTS 

analyst. He was born with a wound in his soul, 
to use the phrase of Pere Lacordaire. (Curi- 
ously enough, he actually contemplated, in 1861, 
becoming a candidate for Lacordaire's vacant seat 
in the French Academy. Sainte-Beuve dissuaded 
him from this folly.) Recall Baudelaire's prayer: 
"Thou, O Lord, my God, grant me the grace to 
produce some fine lines which will prove to my- 
self that I am not the last of men, that I am not in- 
ferior to those I contemn." Individualist, egoist, 
anarchist, his only thought was of letters. Jules 
Laforgue thus described Baudelaire: "Cat, Hin- 
doo, Yankee, Episcopal, alchemist." Yes, an 
alchemist who suffocated in the fumes he created. 
He was of Gothic imagination, and could have 
said with Rolla: Je suis venu trop tard dans 
un monde trop vieux. He had an unassuaged 
thirst for the absolute. The human soul was his 
stage, he its interpreting orchestra. 

In 1857 The Flowers of Evil was published by 
the devoted Poulet-Malassis, who afterward went 
into bankruptcy — a warning to publishers with 
a taste for fine literature. The titles contemplated 
were Limbes, or Lesbiennes. Hippolyte Babou 
suggested the one we know. These poems were 
suppressed on account of six, and poet and pub- 
lisher summoned. As the municipal government 
had made a particular ass of itself in the prose- 
cution of Gustave Flaubert and his Madame 
Bovary, the Baudelaire matter was disposed of 
in haste. He was condemned to a fine of three 
hundred francs, a fine which was never paid, as 

98 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

the objectionable poems were removed. They 
were printed in the Belgian edition, and may be 
read in the new volume of (Euvres Posthumes. 

Baudelaire was infuriated over the judgment, 
for he knew that his book was dramatic in ex- 
pression. He had expected, like Flaubert, to 
emerge from the trial with flying colours; to be 
classed as one who wrote objectionable literature 
was a shock. " Flaubert had the Empress back 
of him," he complained; which was true; the 
Empress Eugenie, also the Princess Mathilde. 
But he worked as ever and put forth those polished 
intaglios called Poems in Prose, for the form of 
which he had taken a hint from Aloys Bertrand's 
Gaspard de la Nuit. He filled this form with a new 
content; not alone pictures, but moods, are to be 
found in these miniatures. Pity is their keynote, 
a tenderness for the abject and lowly, a revelation 
of sensibility that surprised those critics who had 
discerned in Baudelaire only a sculptor of evil. 
In one of his poems he described a landscape of 
metal, of marble and water; a babel of staircases 
and arcades, a palace of infinity, surrounded by 
the silence of eternity. This depressing yet 
magical dream was utilised by Huysmans in his 
A Rebours. But in the tiny landscapes of the 
Prose Poems there is nothing rigid or artificial. 
Indeed, the poet's deliberate attitude of artificiality 
is dropped. He is human. Not that the deep 
fundamental note of humanity is ever absent in 
his poems; the eternal diapason is there even when 
least overheard. Baudelaire is more human than 

99 



EGOISTS 

Poe. His range of sympathy is wider. In this 
he transcends him as a poet, though his subject- 
matter often issues from the very dregs of life. 
Brother to pitiable wanderers, there is, never- 
theless, no trace of cant, no " Russian pity" a 
la Dostoievsky, no humanitarian or socialistic 
rhapsodies in his work. Baudelaire is an egoist. 
He hated the sentimental sapping of altruism. His 
prose-poem, Crowds, with its "bath of multitude," 
may have been suggested by Poe; but in Charles 
Lamb we find the idea: "Are there no solitudes 
out of caves and the desert ? or, cannot the heart, 
in the midst of crowds, feel frightfully alone?" 

His best critical work is the Richard Wagner 
and Tannhauser, a more significant essay than 
Nietzsche's Richard Wagner in Bayreuth; Bau- 
delaire's polemic appeared at a more critical 
period in Wagner's career. Wagner sent a brief, 
hearty letter of thanks to the critic and made his 
acquaintance. To Wagner Baudelaire intro- 
duced a young Wagnerian, Villiers de PIsle 
Adam. This Wagner letter is included in the 
volume of Crepet; but there are no letters pub- 
lished from Baudelaire to Franz Liszt, though they 
were friends. In Weimar I saw at the Liszt house 
several from Baudelaire which should have been 
included in the Letters. The poet understood 
Liszt and his reforms as he understood Wagner's. 
The German composer admired the French poet, 
and his Kundry, of the sultry second act, Parsifal, 
has a Baudelairian hue, especiallv in the tempta- 
tion scene. 

ioo 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

The end was at hand. Baudelaire had been 
steadily, rather, unsteadily, going downhill; a 
desperate figure, a dandy in shabby attire. He 
went out only after dark, he haunted the exterior 
boulevards, associated with birds of nocturnal 
plumage. He drank without thirst, ate without 
hunger, as he has said. A woeful decadence for 
this aristocrat of life and letters. Most sorrow- 
ful of sinners, his morose delectation scourged 
his nerves and extorted the darkest music from 
his lyre.- He fled to Brussels, there to rehabili- 
tate his dwindling fortunes. He gave a few lec- 
tures, and met Rops, Lemonnier, drank to 
forget, and forgot to w r ork. He abused Brussels, 
Belgium, its people. A country where the trees 
are black, the flowers without odour, and where 
there is no conversation. He, the brilliant causeur, 
the chief blaguer of a circle in which young 
James McNeill Whistler was reduced to the role 
of a listener — this most spiritual among artists 
found himself a failure in the Belgium capital. It 
may not be amiss to remind ourselves that Baude- 
laire w T as the creator of most of the paradoxes 
attributed, not only to Whistler, but to an entire 
school — if one may employ such a phrase. The 
frozen imperturbability of the poet, his cutting 
enunciation, his power of blasphemy, his hatred 
of Nature, his love of the artificial, have been 
copied by the aesthetic blades of our day. He 
it was who first taunted Nature with being an 
imitator of art, with being always the same. 
Oh, the imitative sunsets! Oh, the quotidian 

IOI 



EGOISTS 

eating and drinking! And as pessimist, too, 
he led the mode. Baudelaire, like Flaubert, 
.grasped the murky torch of pessimism once 
held by Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, 
and Senancour. Doubtless all this stemmed 
from Byronism. To-day it is all as stale as By- 
ronism. 

His health failed rapidly, and he didn't have 
money enough to pay for doctor's prescriptions; 
he owed for the room in his hotel. At Namur, 
where he was visiting the father-in-law ofFelicien 
Rops* (March, 1866), he suffered from an at- 
tack of paralysis. He was removed to Brussels. 
His mother, who lived at Honfleur, in mourning 
for her husband, came to his aid. Taken to 
France, he was placed in a sanatorium. Aphasia 
set in. He could only ejaculate a mild oath, and 
when he caught sight of himself in the mirror he 
would bow pleasantly as if to a stranger. His 
friends rallied, and they were among the most 
distinguished people in Paris, the elite of souls. 
Ladies visited him, one or two playing Wagner 
on the piano — which must have added a fresh 
nuance to death — and they brought him flowers. 
He expressed his love for flowers and music to the 
last. He could not bear the sight of his mother; 
she revived in him some painful memories, but 
that passed, and he clamoured for her when she 
was absent. If anyone mentioned the names of 
Wagner or Manet, he smiled. Madame Sabatier 
came; so did the Manets. And with a fixed stare, 
as if peering through some invisible window open- 
102 



THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND 

ing upon eternity, he died, August 31, 1867, 
aged forty-six. 

Barbey d'Aurevilly, himself a Satanist and 
dandy (oh, those comical old attitudes of litera- 
ture!), had prophesied that the author of Fleurs du 
Mai would either blow out his brains or prostrate 
himself at the foot of the cross. (Later he said 
the same of Huysmans.) Baudelaire had the 
latter course forced upon him by fate after he 
had attempted spiritual suicide for how many 
years? (He once tried actual suicide, but the 
slight cut in his throat looked so ugly that he went 
no farther.) His soul had been a battle-field 
for the powers of good and evil. That at the 
end he brought the wreck of both soul and body 
to his God is not a subject of comment. He 
was an extraordinary poet with a bad conscience, 
who lived miserably and was buried with honours. 
Then it was that his worth was discovered (funeral 
orations over a genius are a species of public 
staircase wit). His reputation waxes with the 
years. He is an exotic gem in the crown of 
French poetry. Of him Swinburne has chanted 
Ave Atque Vale: 

Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel, 
Brother, on this that was the veil of thee? 



103 



Ill 

THE REAL FLAUBERT 

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, 
And did he stop and speak to you . . . 



It was some time in the late spring or early 
summer of 1879. I was going through the 
Chaussee d'Antin when a huge man, a terrific 
old man, passed me. His long straggling gray 
hair hung low. His red face was that of a soldier 
or a sheik, and was divided by drooping white 
moustaches. A trumpet was his voice, and he 
gesticulated freely to the friend who accompanied 
him. I did not look at him with any particular 
interest until some one behind me — if he be 
dead now may he be eternally blest! — exclaimed: 
"C'est Flaubert!" Then I stared; for though I 
had not read Madame Bovary I adored the 
verbal music of Salammbo, secretly believing, 
however, that it had been written by Melchior, 
one of the three Wise Kings who journeyed under 
the beckoning star of Bethlehem — how else ac- 
count for its planturous Asiatic prose, for its evo- 
cations of a vanished past ? But I knew the name 
104 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

of Flaubert, that magic collocation of letters, and 
I gazed at him. He returned my glance from 
prominent eyeballs, the colour of the pupil a bit 
of faded blue sky. He did not smile. He was 
too tender-hearted, despite his appreciation of the 
absurd. Besides, he knew, He, too, had been 
young and foolish. He, too, had worn a velvet 
coat and a comical cap, and had dreamed. I 
must have been a ridiculous spectacle. My hair 
was longer than my technique. I was studying 
Chopin or lunar rainbows then — I have forgotten 
which — and fancied that to be an artist one must 
dress like a cross between a brigand and a studio 
model. But I was happy. Perhaps Flaubert 
knew this, for he resisted the temptation to smile. 
And then he passed from my view. To be frank, I 
was not very much impressed, because earlier 
in the day I had seen Paul de Cassagnac and that 
famous duellist was romantic-looking, which the 
old Colossus of Croisset was not. When I re- 
turned to the Batignolles I told the concierge of 
my day's outing. 

"Ah!" he remarked, "M. Flaubert! M. Paul 
de Cassagnac! — a great man, Monsieur P-paul!" 
He stuttered a little. Now I only remember 
"M. Flaubert," with his eyes like a bit of faded 
blue sky. Was it a dream? Was it Flaubert? 
Did some stranger cruelly deceive me? But I'll 
never relinquish the memory of my glorious mirage. 

Where was he going, Gustave Flaubert, on that 
sunny afternoon ? It was at the time when Jules 
Ferry appointed him an assistant-librarian at 

105 



EGOISTS 

the Mazarine; hors cadre, a sinecure, a veiled 
pension with 3,000 francs a year; a charity, as the 
great writer bitterly complained. He was poor. 
He had given up, without a murmur, his entire 
fortune to his niece, then Madame Caroline Com- 
mainville, and through the influence of Turgenev 
and a few others this position had been created 
for him. He had no duties, yet he insisted on 
arriving at his post as early as half-past seven in 
the morning. He planned later that the govern- 
ment should be reimbursed for its outlay. His 
brother, Dr. Achille Flaubert, of Rouen, gave him 
a similar allowance, so the unhappy man had 
enough to live upon. Perhaps he was going to 
the Gare Saint-Lazare to take a train for Crois- 
set; perhaps he was starting for Ancient Corinth 
— I thought — to see once more his Salammbo 
veiled by the sacred Zaimph; or he might have 
been on the point of departing for Taprobana, the 
Ceylon of the antique world; that island whose very 
name he repeated with the same pleasure as did the 
old woman the blessed name of " Mesopotamia.' ' 
Taprobana! Taprobana! would cry Gustave 
Flaubert, to the despair of his friends. He was a 
man in love with beautiful sounds. He filled his 
books with them and with beautiful pictures. You 
must go to Beethoven or Liszt for a like variety in 
rhythms; the Flaubertian prose rhythms change in 
every sentence, like a landscape alternately swept 
by sunlight or shadowed by clouds. They vary 
with the moods and movements of the characters. 
They are music for ear and eye. And they can 

106 



^ ; *.«*, /./i. -A* * ^ 




^JJi- /C htn^j, ; ^ 



Fac-simile of an unpublished Flaubert letter. 
I07 



EGOISTS 

never be translated. He is poet, painter, and 
composer, and he is the most artistic of novelists. 
If his work is deficient in sentiment; if he fails to 
strike the chords of pity of Dostoievsky, Turgenev, 
and Tolstoy; if he lacks the teeming variety of Bal- 
zac, he is superior to them all as an artist. Because 
of his stern theories of art, he renounced the facile 
victories of sentimentalism. He does not invite 
his readers to smile or weep with him. He is not 
a manipulator of marionettes. And he can com- 
press in a page more than Balzac in a volume. In 
part he derives from Chateaubriand, Gautier, and 
Hugo, and he was a lover of Rabelais, Shakespeare, 
and Montaigne. His psychology is simple; he 
believed that character should express itself by 
action. His landscapes in the Dutch, "tight," 
miniature style, or the large, luminous, "loose" 
manner of Hobbema; or -again full of the silver 
repose of Claude and the dark romantic beauty 
of Rousseau — witness the forest of Fontaine- 
bleau in Sentimental Education — are ravishing. 
He has painted interiors incomparably — this 
novel is filled with them: balls, cafe-life, political 
meetings, receptions, ladies in their drawing- 
rooms, Meissonier-like virtuosity in details or the 
bourgeois elegance of Alfred Stevens. As a por- 
traitist Flaubert recalls Velasquez, Rembrandt, 
or Hals, and not a little of the diablerie to be found 
in the Flemish masters of grotesque. Emma 
Bovary is the most perfectly finished portrait in 
fiction and Frederic Moreau is nearly as life-like 
— the eternal middle-class Young Man. Madame 

108 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

Arnoux, chiefly rendered by marvellous evasions, 
is in the clear-obscure of Rembrandt. Homais 
stands alone, a subject the delineation of which 
Swift would have envied. And Rosannette Bron 
— the truest record of her class ever depicted, and 
during the same decade that saw the odious senti- 
mental and false Camille. Or Salome in Herodias, 
that vision, cruel, feline, exquisite, which lesser 
writers have sought vainly to imitate. (Gustave 
Moreau alone transposed her to paint — Moreau, 
too, was a cenobite of art.) Or Felicite in Trois 
Contes. Or the perpetual journalist, Hussonet, 
the swaggering politician, Regimbart, Pellerin, 
the dilettante painter, the socialist, Senecal, and 
Arnoux, the immortal charlatan. Whatever sub- 
ject Flaubert attacked, a masterpiece emerged. 
He lqft few books; each represents the pinnacle 
of its genre: Bovary, Salammbo, Sentimental 
Education, Herodias, Bouvard and Pecuchet — 
this last-named an epitome of human stupidity. 
Not an original philosophic intellect, neverthe- 
less a philosophy has been drawn from Flaubert's 
work by the brilliant French philosopher Jules 
Gaultier, who defines Bovaryisme as that ten- 
dency in mankind to appear other than it is; 
a tendency which is an important factor in our 
mental and social evolution. Without illusions 
mankind would take to the trees, the abode, we 
are told, of our prehistoric arboreal ancestors. 
Nevertheless, Emma Bovary as a philosophic 
symbol would have greatly astonished Gustave 
Flaubert. 

109 



EGOISTS 



II 



"Since Goethe," might be a capital title for an 
essay on the epics that were written after the death 
of the noblest German of them all. The list 
would be small. In France there are only the 
rather barren rhetorical exercise of Edgar Qui- 
net's Ahasverus, the surging insurrectionary poems 
of Hugo, and the faultlessly frigid performance 
of Leconte de Lisle. But a work of such heroic 
power and proportions as Faust there is not, ex- 
cept Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Antony, 
which is so impregnated by the Faustian spirit — 
though poles apart from the German poem in its 
development — that, when we hear the youthful 
Gustave was a passionate admirer and student of 
Goethe, even addressing a long poem in alexan- 
drines to his memory, we are not surprised. The 
real Flaubert is only beginning to be revealed. 
His four volumes of correspondence, his single 
volume of letters addressed to George Sand, and 
the recently published letters to his niece Caroline 
— now Madame Franklin Grout of Antibes — 
have shown us a very different Flaubert from the 
legend chiefly created by Maxime du Camp. 
Dr. Felix Dumesnil, in his remarkable study, has 
told us of the Rouen master's neurasthenia and 
has utterly disproved Du Camp's malicious yarns 
about epilepsy. Above all, Flaubert's devotion 
to Goethe and the recent publication of the first 
version of his Saint Antony have presented a 
no 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

novel picture of his personality. We now know 
that, striving to become impersonal in art, he is 
personal and present in every page he ever wrote; 
furthermore that, despite his incessant clamours 
and complaints, he, in reality, loved his galley- 
like, self-imposed labours. 

The Temptation of Saint Antony is the only 
modern poem of epical largeness that may be 
classed with Brand or Zarathustra. It recalls 
at times the Second Part of Faust in its sweep and 
grandeur, in its grandiose visions; but though it is 
superior in verbal beauty it falls short of Goethe 
in its presentation of the problems of human will. 
Faust is a man who wills; Antony is static, not 
dynamic; the one is tempted by the Devil and 
succumbs, but does not lose his soul; Flaubert's 
hermit resists the Devil at his subtlest, yet we do 
not feel that his soul is as much worth the saving 
as Faust's. Ideas are the heroes in Flaubert's 
prose epic. Saint Antony is a metaphysical 
drama, not a human one like Faust; neverthe- 
less, to Faust alone may we compare it. 

Flaubert was born at Rouen, December 12, 
182 1, where he died May 18, 1880. That he 
practically passed his years at Croisset, his moth- 
er's home, below Rouen facing the Seine, and in 
his study toiling like a titan over his books, should 
be recorded in every text-book of literature. For 
he is the patron-saint of all true literary men. 
He had a comfortable income. He thought, 
talked, lived literature. His friends Du Camp, 
Louis Bouilhet, Turgenev, Taine, Baudelaire, 

in 



EGOISTS 

Zola, the Goncourts, Daudet, Renan, Maupassant, 
Henry James, have testified to his absorption in 
his art. It is almost touching in these times when 
a man goes into the writing business as if vend- 
ing tripe, to recall the example of Flaubert for 
whom art was more sacred than religion. Natu- 
rally, he has been proved by the madhouse doctors 
to have been half cracked. Perhaps he was not 
as sane as a stockbroker, but it takes all sorts to 
make a world and a writer of Flaubert's rank 
should not be weighed in the same scales with, 
say, a successful politician. 

He was endowed with a nervous temperament, 
though up to his twenty-second year he was as 
handsome and as free from sickness as a god. He 
was very tall and his eyes were sea-green. A 
nervous crisis supervened and at wide intervals 
returned. It was almost fatal for Gustave. He 
became pessimistic and afraid of life. However, 
the talk of his habitual truculent pessimism has 
been exaggerated. Naturally optimistic, with a 
powerful constitution and a stout heart, he worked 
like the Trojan he was. His pessimism came 
with the years during his boyhood — Byronic 
literary spleen was in the air. He was a grumbler 
and rather overdid the peevish pose. As Zola 
asked: "What if he had been forced to earn his 
living by writing?" But, even in his blackest 
moods, he was glad to see his friends at Croisset, 
glad to go up to Paris for recreation. His let- 
ters, so free, fluent, explosive, give us the true 
Flaubert ,who childishly roared yet was so hearty, 

112 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

so friendly, so loving to his mother, niece, and 
intimates. His heredity was puzzling. His father 
was, like Baudelaire's grandfather, of Champe- 
nois stock; bourgeois, steady, a renowned surgeon. 
From him Gustave inherited his taste for all that 
pertained to medicine and science. Recall his 
escapades as a boy when he would peep for hours 
into the dissecting-room of the Rouen hospital. 
Such matters fascinated him. He knew more 
about the theory and practice of medicine than 
many professional men. An air of mortality ex- 
hales from his pages. He is in Madame Bovary 
the keen soul-surgeon. His love of a quiet, sober 
existence came to him from his father. He clung 
to one house for nearly a half century. He has 
said that one must live like a bourgeois and think 
like an artist; to be ascetic in life and violent in 
art — that was a Flaubert maxim. "I live only 
in my ideas," he wrote. But from the mother's 
side, a Norman and aristocrat she was, he inherited 
his love of art, his disdain for philistines, his ad- 
venturous disposition — transposed because of 
his malady to the cerebral region, to his imagina- 
tion. He boasted Canadian blood, "red skin," 
he called it, but that was merely a mystification. 
The dissonance of temperament made itself felt 
early. He was the man of Goethe with two spirits 
struggling within him. Dual in temperament, he 
swung from an almost barbaric Romanticism to 
a cruel analysis of life that made him the pontiff 
of the Realistic school. He hated realism, yet an 
inner force set him to the disagreeable task of 

"3 



EGOISTS 

writing Madame Bovary and Sentimental Edu- 
cation — the latter, with its daylight atmosphere, 
the supreme exemplar of realism in fiction. So 
was it with his interior life. He was a mystic who 
no longer believed. These dislocations of his 
personality he combated all his life, and his books 
show with what success. " Flaubert," wrote 
Turgenev, his closest friend, to George Sand, 
"has tenacity without energy, just as he has self- 
love without vanity.'' But what tenacity! 

Touching on the question of epilepsy, a careful 
reading of Dumesnil convinces anyone, but the 
neurologist with a fixed idea, that Flaubert was 
not a sufferer from genuine epilepsy. Not that 
there is any reason why epilepsy and genius should 
be divorced; we know in many cases the contrary 
is the reverse. Take the case of Dostoievsky — 
his epilepsy was one of the most fruitful of motives 
in his stories. Nearly all his heroes and heroines 
are attainted. (Read The Idiot or the Karamsoff 
Brothers.) But Flaubert's epilepsy was arranged 
for him by Du Camp, who thought that by calling 
him an epilept in his untrustworthy Memoirs he 
would belittle Flaubert. And he did, for in his 
time the now celebrated — and discredited — 
theory of genius and its correlation with the falling- 
sickness had not been propounded. Flaubert 
had hystero-neurasthenia. He was rheumatic, 
asthmatic, predisposed to arterio-sclerosis and 
apoplexy. He died of an apoplectic stroke. His 
. early nervous fits were without the aura of epilepsy; 
he did not froth at the mouth nor were there mus- 
114 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

cular contractions; not even at his death. Dr. 
Tourneaux, who hastened to aid him in the ab- 
sence of his regular physician, Dr. Fortin, denied 
the rumours of epilepsy that were so gaily spread 
by that sublime old gossip, Edmond de Goncourt, 
also by Zola and Du Camp. The contraction of 
Flaubert's hands was caused by the rigidity of 
death; most conclusive of all evidence against the 
epileptic theory is the fact that during his oc- 
casional fits Gustave never lost consciousness. 
Nor did he suffer from any attacks before he had 
attained his majority, whereas epilepsy usually 
begins at an early age. He studied with intense 
zeal his malady and in a dozen letters refers to it, 
tickets its symptoms, tells of plans to escape 
the crises, and altogether, has furnished students 
of pathology many examples of nerve-exhaustion 
and its mitigation. His first attacks began at 
Pont-Audemar, in 1843. In 1849 he had a fresh 
attack. His trip to the Orient relieved him. 
He was a Viking, a full-blooded man, who scorned 
sensible hygiene; he took no exercise beyond a 
walk in the morning, a w T alk in the evening on 
his terrace, and in summer an occasional swim 
in the Seine. He ate copiously, was moderate 
in drinking, smoked fifteen or twenty pipes a 
day, abused black coffee, and for months at a 
stretch worked fifteen hours out of the twenty- 
four at his desk. He warned his disciple, Guy 
de Maupassant, against too much boating as 
being destructive of mental productivity. After 
Nietzsche read this he wrote: " Sedentary applica- 

"5 



EGOISTS 

tion is the very sin against the Holy Ghost. Only 
thoughts won by walking are valuable.' ' In 1870 
another crisis was brought on by protracted la- 
bours over the revision of the definitive version of 
the Saint Antony. His travels in Normandy, in 
the East, his visits to London (185 1) and to Righi- 
Kaltbad, together with sojourns in Paris — where 
he had a little apartment — make up the itinerary 
of his fifty-eight years. Is it any wonder that he 
died of apoplexy, stricken at his desk, he of a 
violently sanguine temperament, bull-necked, and 
the blood always in his face ? 

Maurice Spronck, who took too seriously the 
saying of Flaubert — a lover of extravagant 
paradox — thinks the writer had a cerebral lesion, 
which he called audition coloree. It is a malady 
peculiar to imaginative natures, which transposes 
tone to colour, or odour to sound. As this " mal- 
ady" may be found in poets from the dawn of 
creation, "coloured audition" must be a necessary 
quality of art. Flaubert took pains to exaggerate 
his speech when in company with the Goncourts. 
He suspected their diary-keeping weakness and 
he humoured it by telling' fibs about his work. 
"I have finished my book, the cadence of the 
last paragraph has been found. Now I shall 
write it." Aghast were the brothers at the idea 
of an author beginning his book backward. 
Flaubert boasted that the colour of Salammbo 
was purple. Sentimental Education (a bad 
title, as Turgenev wrote him; Withered Fruits, his 
first title, would have been better) was gray, and 

116 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

Madame Bovary was for him like the colouring 
of certain mouldy wood-vermin. The Goncourts 
solemnly swallowed all this, as did M. Spronck. 
Which moved Anatole France to exclaim: "Oh 
these young clinicians !" 

But what is all this when compared with the 
magnificent idiocy of Du Camp, who asserted that 
if Flaubert had not suffered from epilepsy he 
would have become a genius! Henaurme! as the 
man who made such masterpieces as Madame 
Bovary, Sentimental Education, Temptation of 
Saint Antony, the Three Tales, Bouvard et Pe- 
cuchet, had a comical habit of exclaiming. 
Enormous, too, was Guy de Maupassant's man- 
ner of avenging his master's memory. In the 
final edition — eight volumes long — Maupassant, 
with the unerring eye of hatred, affixed an intro- 
duction to Bouvard et Pecuchet. Therein he 
printed Maxime du Camp's letters to Flaubert 
during the period when Madame Bovary was 
appearing in the Revue de Paris. Du Camp 
was one of its editors. He urged Flaubert to 
cut the novel — the concision of which is so ad- 
mirable, the organic quality of which is absolute. 
Worse still remains. If Flaubert couldn't per- 
form the operation himself, then the aforesaid 
Du Camp would hire some experienced hack to 
do it for the sensitive author; wounded vanity 
Du Camp believed to be the cause of indignant 
remonstrances. They eliminated the scene of the 
agricultural fair and the operation on the hostler's 
foot — one scene as marvellous as a genre paint- 
117 



EGOISTS 

ing by Teniers with its study of the old farm 
servant, and psychologically more profound; the 
other necessary to the development of the story. 
Thus Madame Bovary was slaughtered serially 
by a man ignorant of art, that Madame Bovary 
which is one of the glories of French literature, 
as Mr. James truly says. Flaubert scribbled on 
Du Camp's letters another of his favourite ex- 
pletives, Gigantesque! Flaubert never forgave 
him, but they were apparently reconciled years 
later. Du Camp went into the Academy; 
Flaubert refused to consider a candidacy, though 
Victor Hugo — wittily nicknamed by Jules La- 
forgue "Aristides the Just" — urged him to do 
so. Even the mighty Balzac was too avid of 
glory and gold for Flaubert, to whom art and its 
consolations were all-sufficing. 



Ill 



Bouvard et Pecuchet was never finished. Its 
increasing demands killed Flaubert. In his desk 
were found many cahiers of notes taken to illus- 
trate the fatuity of mankind, its stupidity, its 
betise. He was as pitiless as Swift or Schopen- 
hauer in his contempt for low ideals and vulgar 
pretensions, for the very bourgeois from whom 
he sprung. In the collection we find this gem of 
wisdom uttered by Louis Napoleon in 1865: 
"The richness of a country depends on its gen- 
eral prosperity.' ' To it should be included the 
Homais-like dictum of Maxime du Camp that 
118 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

if Flaubert had not been an epilept he would 
have been a genius! Or, the following hospital 
criticism; Flaubert was denied creative ability! 
Who has denied it to him ? Homais alone in his 
supreme asininity should be a beacon-light of 
warning for any one of these inept critics. Flau- 
bert once wrote: u Iam reading books on hygiene; 
how comical they are! What impertinence these 
physicians have! What asses for the most part 
they are!" And he, the son of a celebrated sur- 
geon and the brother of another, a medical 
student himself, might have made Homais a 
psychiatrist instead of a druggist, if he had lived 
longer. 

Du Camp — who, clever and witty as well as in- 
exact and reckless in statement, was a man given 
to envies and literary jealousies — never got 
over Flaubert's startling success with Madame 
B ovary. He once wrote a fanciful epitaph for 
Louise Colet, a French woman of mediocrity, the 
"Muse" of Flaubert, a general trouble-breeder 
and a recipient of Flaubert's correspondence. The- 
Colet had embroiled herself with De Musset and 
published a spiteful romance in which poor 
Flaubert was the villain. This the Du Camp 
inscription: "Here lies the woman who com- 
promised Victor Cousin, made Alfred de Musset 
ridiculous, calumniated Gustave Flaubert, and 
tried to assassinate Alphonse Karr: Requiescat 
in pace." A like epitaph suggests itself for 
Maxime du Camp: Hie jacet the man who 
slandered Baudelaire, traduced his loving friend 
119 



EGOISTS 

Gustave Flaubert, and was snuffed out of critical 
existence by Guy de Maupassant. 

The massive-shouldered Hercules, Flaubert, a 
Hercules spinning prose for his exacting Dejanira 
of art, was called unintelligent by Anatole France. 
He had not, it is true, the subtle critical brain and 
thorough scholarship of M. France; yet Flaubert 
was learned. Brunetiere even taxed, him with 
an excess of erudition. But his multitudinous 
conversation, his lack of logic, his rather gross 
sense of humour, are not to be found in his work. 
Without that work, without Salammbo, for ex- 
ample, should we have had the pleasure, thrice- 
distilled, of reading Anatole France's Thais ? (See 
a single instance in the definitive edition Tempta- 
tion, page 115, the episode of the Gymnosophist.) 
All revivals of the antique world are unsatis- 
factory at best, whether Chateaubriand's Mar- 
tyrs, or the unsubstantial lath and plaster of 
Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeii, or the flab- 
biness and fustian of Quo Vadis. The most 
perfect attempt is Salammbo, an opera in words, 
and its battlements of purple prose were rid- 
dled by Sainte-Beuve, by Froehner, and lately 
by Maurice Pezard — who has proved to his 
own satisfaction that Flaubert was sadly amiss in 
his Punic archaeology. Well, who cares if he 
was incorrect in details ? His partially successful 
reconstruction of an epoch is admitted, though 
the human element is somewhat obliterated. 
Flaubert was bound to be more Carthaginian 
than Carthage. 

120 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

After the scandal caused by the prosecution of 
Madame Bovary Flaubert was afraid to publish 
his 1856, second version of Saint Antony. He had 
been advised by the sapient Du Camp to cast the 
manuscript into the fire, after a reading before 
Bouilhet and Du Camp lasting thirty-three hours. 
He refused. This was in September, 1849. Du 
Camp declares that he asked him to essay " the De- 
launay affair/' meaning the Delamarre story. This 
Flaubert did, and the result was the priceless his- 
tory of Charles and Emma Bovary. D'Aurevilly 
attacked the book viciously; Baudelaire defended 
it. Later Turgenev wrote to Flaubert: " After all 
you are Flaubert!" George Sand was a mother- 
ly consoler. Their letters are delightful. She 
did not quite understand the bluff, naive Gustave, 
she who composed so flowingly, and could turn 
on or off her prose like the tap of a kitchen 
hydrant (the simile is her own). How could she 
fathom the tormented desire of her friend for 
perfection, for the blending of idea and image, 
for the eternal pursuit of the right word, the 
shapely sentence, the cadenced coda of a para- 
graph? And of the larger demands of style, of 
the subtle tone of a page, a chapter, a book, 
why should this fluent and graceful writer, called 
George Sand, concern herself with such super- 
fluities! It was always O altitudo in art with 
Flaubert — the most copious, careless of corre- 
spondents. He had set for himself an im- 
possible standard of perfection and an ideal 
of impersonality neither of which he realized. 
121 



EGOISTS 

But there is no outward sign of conflict in his 
work; all trace of the labour bestowed upon his 
paragraphs is absent. His style is simple, direct, 
large, above all, clear, the clarity of classic prose. 

His declaiming aloud his sentences has been 
adduced to prove his absence of sanity. Bee- 
thoven, too, was pronounced crazy by his various 
landladies because he sang and howled in his 
voice of a composer his compositions in the ma- 
king. Flaubert was the possessor of an accurate 
musical ear; not without justice did Coppee call 
him the " Beethoven of French prose." His 
sense of rhythm was acute; he carried it so far that 
he would sacrifice grammar to rhythmic flow. 
He tested his sentences aloud. Once in his apart- 
ment, Rue Murillo, overlooking Pare Monceau, he 
rehearsed a page of a new book for hours. Be- 
lated coachmen, noting the open windows, hearing 
an outrageous vocal noise, concluded that a musi- 
cal soiree was in progress. Gradually the street 
filled on either side with carriages in search of 
passengers. But the guests never emerged from 
the house. In the early morning the lights were 
extinguished and the oaths of the disappointed 
ones must have been heard by Flaubert. 

He would annotate three hundred volumes for 
a page of facts. His bump of scrupulousness was 
large. In twenty pages he sometimes saved three 
or four from destruction. He did not become, 
however, as captious as Balzac in the handling of 
proofs. A martyr of style, he was not altogether 
an enameller in precious stones, not a patient 
122 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

mosaic-maker, superimposing here and there a 
precious verbal jewel. First, the image, and then 
its appropriate garb; sometimes image and phrase 
were born simultaneously, as was the case with 
Richard Wagner. These extraordinary things 
may happen to men, of genius, who are neither 
opium-eaters nor lunatics. The idea that Flau- 
bert was ever addicted to drugs — beyond the qui- 
nine with which his good father dosed him after 
the fashion of those days — is ridiculous. The 
gorgeous visions of Saint Antony are the results 
of stupendous preparatory studies, a stupendous 
power of fantasy, and a stupendous concentration. 
Opium superinduces visions, but not the power 
and faculty of attention to record them in terms of 
literature for forty years. George Saintsbury 
has pronounced Saint Antony the most perfect 
specimen of dream literature extant. And be- 
cause of its precision in details, its architectonic, 
its deep-hued waking hallucinations. 

Flaubert was a very nervous man, " as hysterical 
as an old woman," said Dr. Hardy of the hospital 
Saint-Louis, but neither mad nor epileptic. His 
mental development was not arrested in his youth, 
as asserted by Du Camp; he had arranged his life 
from the time he decided to become a writer. 
He was one with the exotic painter, Gustave 
Moreau, in his abhorrence of the mob. He was a 
poet who wrote a perfect prose, not prose-poetry. 
Enamoured of the antique, of the Orient, of 
mystical subjects, he spent a lifetime in the elabora- 
tion of his beloved themes. That he was ob- 
123 



EGOISTS 

sessed by them is merely to say that he was the 
possessor of mental energy and artistic gifts. He 
was not happy. He never brought his interior 
and exterior lives into complete harmony. An 
unparalleled observer, an imaginative genius, he 
was a child outside the realm of art. Soft of 
heart, he raised his niece as a daughter; a loving 
son, he would console himself after his mother's 
death by looking at the dresses she once wore. 
Flaubert a sentimentalist! He outlived his fam- 
ily and his friends, save a few; death was never 
far away from his thoughts; he would weep over 
his souvenirs. At Croisset I have talked with the 
faithful Colange, whose card reads: "E. Colange, 
ex-cook of Gustave Flaubert!" The affection of 
the novelist for cats and dogs, he told me, was 
marked. The study pavilion is to-day a Flau- 
bert Memorial. The parent house is gone, and 
in 1 90 1 there was a distillery on the grounds, 
which is now a printing establishment. Flaubert 
cherished the notion that Pascal had once stopped 
in the old Croisset homestead; that Abbe Prevost 
had written Manon Lescaut within its walls. He 
had many such old-fashioned and darling tics, and 
he is to be envied them. 

Since Madame Bovary French fiction, for the 
most part, has been Flaubert with variations. His 
influence is still incalculable. Francois Coppee 
wrote: "By the extent and the magnificence of 
his prose, Gustave Flaubert equals Bossuet and 
Chateaubriand. He is destined to become a 
great classic. And several centuries hence — ev- 
124 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

erything perishes — when the French language 
shall have become only a dead language, candi- 
dates for the bachelor's degree will be able to 
obtain it only by expounding (along with the 
famous exordium, He Who Reigns in the Heavens, 
etc., or The Departure of the Swallows, of Rene) 
the portrait of Catharine le Roux, the farm 
servant, in Madame Bovary, or the episode of the 
Crucified Lions in Salammbo." 



IV 



With the critical taste that uncovers bare the 
bones of the dead I have no concern, nor shall I 
enter the way which would lead me into the 
dusty region of professional ethics. Every por- 
trait painter from Titian to John Sargent, from 
Velasquez to Zuloaga, has had a model. Novel- 
ists are no less honest when they build their char- 
acters upon human beings they have known and 
studied, whether their name be Fielding or Balzac 
or Flaubert. 

The curiosity which seeks to unveil the anonym- 
ity of a novelist's personages may not be exactly 
laudable; it is yet excusable. I am reminded of 
its existence by a certain Parisian journalist who, 
acting upon information that appeared in the 
pages of a well-known French literary review, went 
to Normandy in search of the real Emma Bovary. 
Once called wicked, the novel has been pronounced 
as moral as a Sunday-school tract. Thackeray 
admired its style, but deplored, with his accus- 
es 



EGOISTS 

tomed streak of sentimentalism, the cold-blooded 
analysis which hunted Emma to an ignominious 
grave. Yet the author of Vanity Fair did not 
hesitate to pursue through many chapters his 
mercurial Rebecca Sharp. 

The story of Emma Bovary would hardly at- 
tract, if published in the daily news columns, 
much attention nowadays. A good-looking young 
provincial woman tires of her honest, slow-going 
husband. She reads silly novels, as do thousands 
of silly married girls to-day. Emma lived in a 
little town not far from Rouen. Flaubert named 
it Yonville. We read that Emma flirted with a 
country squire who in order to escape eloping with 
the romantic goose suddenly disappeared. She 
consoled herself with a young law student, but 
when he tired of her the consequences were lam- 
entable. Harassed by debt, Emma took poison. 
Her stupid husband, a hard-working district 
doctor, was aghast at her death and puzzled by 
the ruin which followed fast at its heels. He 
found it all out, even the love-letters of the squire. 
He died suddenly. 

A sordid tale, but perfectly told and remarkable 
not only for the fidelity of the landscapes, the 
chaste restraint of the style, but also because 
there are half a dozen marvellously executed 
characters, several of which have entered into 
the living current of French speech. Homais, 
the vainglorious, yet human and likable Homais, 
is a synonym for pedantic bragging mediocrity. 
He is a druggist. He would have made an ideal 

126 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

politician. He stands for a shallow " modernity " 
but is more superstitious than a mediaeval sexton. 
Flaubert's novel left an indelible mark in French 
fiction and philosophy. Even Balzac did not 
create a Homais. 

Now comes the curious part of the story. It 
was the transcription of a real occurrence. 
Flaubert did not invent it. In a town near 
Rouen named Ry there was once a young phy- 
sician, Louis Delamarre. He originally hailed 
from Catenay, where his father practised medi- 
cine. In the novel Ry is called Yonville. Dela- 
marre paid his addresses to Delphine Couturier, 
who in 1843 was twenty-three years of age. She 
w r as comely, had a bright though superficial 
mind, spoke in a pretentious manner, and over- 
dressed. From her father she inherited her 
vanity and the desire to appear as occupying a 
more exalted position than she did. The elder 
Couturier owned a farm, though heavily mort- 
gaged, at Vieux-Chateau. He was a close-fisted 
Norman anxious to marry off his daughters — 
Emma had a sister. He objected to the advances 
of the youthful physician, chiefly because he 
saw no great match for his girl. Herein the tale 
diverges from life. 

But love laughs at farmers as well as lock- 
smiths, and by a ruse worthy of Paul de Kock, 
Delphine, by feigning maternity, got the parental 
permission. She soon regretted her marriage. 
The husband, Louis, was prosaic. He earned 
the daily bread and butter of the household, 

127 



. EGOISTS 

and even economised so that his pretty wife 
could buy fallals and foolish books. She hired 
a servant and had her day at home — Fridays. 
No one visited her. She was only an unim- 
portant spouse of a poverty-stricken country 
doctor. At Saint-Germain des Essours there 
still lives an octogenarian peasant woman once 
the domestic of the Delamarres-Bovarys. She 
said, when asked to describe her mistress: "Heav- 
ens, but she was pretty. Face, figure, hair, all 
were beautiful." 

In Ry there was a druggist named Jouanne. He 
is the original Homais. Delphine's, or rather 
Emma Bovary's, first admirer was a law clerk, 
Louis Bottet. He is described as a small, im- 
patient, alert old man at the time of his death. 
The faithless Rodolphe — what a name for 
sentimental melodrama — was really a proprietor 
named Campion. He lost his farm and revenue 
after Emma's death and went to America to 
make his fortune. Unsuccessful, he returned 
to Paris, and about 1852 shot himself on the 
boulevard. Who may deny, after this, that truth 
is stranger than Flaubert's fiction? 

The good, sensible old Abbe Bournisien, who 
advised Emma Bovary, when she came to him 
for spiritual consolation, to consult her doctor 
husband, was, in reality, an Abbe Lafortune. 
The irony of events is set forth in sinister relief 
by the epitaph which the real Emma's husband 
had carved on her tomb: "She was a good 
mother, a good wife." Gossips of Ry aver that 

128 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

after the truth came to Dr. Delamarre he took 
a slow poison. But this seems turning the screw 
a trifle too far. Mme. Delamarre, or Emma 
Bovary, was buried in the graveyard of the only 
church at Ry. To-day the tomb is no longer in 
existence. She died March 6, 1848. The in- 
habitants still show the church, — the porch of 
which was too narrow to allow the passage of 
unlucky Emma's coffin — the house of her hus- 
band, and the apothecary shop of M. Homais. 
The latter survived for many years the unhappy 
heroine, who stole the poison that killed her 
from his stock. A delightful touch of Homais- 
like humour was displayed — one that exoner- 
ated Flaubert from the charge of exaggeration 
in portraying Homais — when the novel appeared. 
The characters were at once recognized, both in 
Rouen and Ry. This druggist, Jouanne-Homais, 
was flattered at the lengthy study of himself, 
of course missing its relentless ironic strokes. 
He regretted openly that the author had not 
consulted him; for, said he, "I could have given 
him many points about which he knew nothing." 
The epitaph which the real Homais composed 
for the tomb of his wife — surely you can never 
forget her after reading the novel — is magnifi- 
cent in its bombast. Flaubert knew his man. 

The distinguished writer is a sober narrator of 
facts. His is not a domain of delicate thrills. 
His women are neither doves nor devils. He 
does not paint those acrobats of the soul so dear 
to psychological fiction. Despite his pretended 

129 



EGOISTS 

impassibility, he is tender-hearted; the pity he 
felt for his characters is not effusively expressed. 
But the larger rhythms of humanity are ever 
present. If he had been hard of heart, he would 
have related the Bovary tale as it happened in life. 
Charles Bovary finds the love-letters and meets 
Rodolphe. Nothing happens. The real Charles 
never knew of the real Emma's treachery. 
Madame d'Epinay was not far amiss when she 
wrote: "The profession of woman is very hard. 



No less a masterpiece than Don Quixote has 
been cited in critical comparison with Madame 
Bovary. Flaubert was called the Cervantes 
who had ridiculed from the field the Romantic 
School. This irritated him, for he never posed 
as a realist; indeed, he confessed that he had 
intended to mock the Realistic School — then 
headed by Champfleury — in his Bovary. The 
very name of this book would arouse a storm of 
abuse from him. He knew that he had more 
than one book in him, he believed better books ; t 
the indifference of the public to Sentimental 
Education and the Temptation he never under- 
stood. Much astonishment was expressed, after 
the appearance of Bovary, that such a mature 
work of art should have been the author's first. 
But Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms did not permit 
their juvenile efforts to see the light; the same 

130 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

was the case with Flaubert. In 1835 — he 
was fourteen at the time — he wrote Mort du 
Due de Guise; in 1836 another historical study. 
Short stories in the style of Hoffmann, with 
thrilling titles, such as Rage et Impuissance, Le 
Reve d'Enfer (1837), and a psychologic effort, 
Agonies (dedicated to Alfred le Poittevin — as are 
both versions of the Temptation; Alfred's sister 
later became the mother of Guy de Maupas- 
sant): all these exercises, as is a Dance of Death, 
are still in manuscript. But in 1839 a scenario of a 
mystery bearing the cryptic title of Smarh was 
written; and this with Novembre, and a study of 
Rabelais, and Nuit de Don Juan, have been pub- 
lished in the definitive edition; with a record of 
travels in Normandy. The Memoirs of a Mad- 
man appeared a few years ago in a Parisian mag- 
azine. It was a youthful effort. There is also 
in the collection of Madame Grout a 300-page 
manuscript (1843-1845) named L'Education 
Sentimentale — vaguely inspired by Wilhelm 
Meister — which has nothing in common 
with his novel of the same name published 
in 1869. 

Flaubert's taste in the matter of titles was la- 
mentable. He made a scenario for a tale called 
Spiral, and he often asserted that he hankered 
to write in marmoreal prose the Combat of 
Thermopylae; he meditated, too, a novel the 
scene and characters laid in the Second Empire, 
and dilated upon the beauty of a portrait ex- 
ecuted in microscopic detail of that immortal 

131 



EGOISTS 

character, M. le Prefet. We might have had 
a second Homais if he had made this project 
a reality. He told Turgenev that he had an- 
other idea, a sort of modern Matron of Ephesus 
— in the Temptation there is an episode that 
suggests the Ephesus. He did not lack invention 
and he was an extremely rapid writer — but his 
artistic conscience was morbidly sensitive. It 
pained him to see Zola throwing his better self 
to the dogs in his noisy, inartistic novels — in 
which, he said, was neither poetry nor art. And 
he wrote this opinion to Zola, who promptly 
called him an idiot. In that correct but colour- 
less book of Faguet' s on Flaubert, the critic makes 
note of all the novelist's grammatical errors and 
reaches the conclusion that he was a stylist 
unique, but not careful in his grammar. Now, 
while this is piffling pedantry, the facts are in 
Faguet's favour; Faguet, who holds the critical 
scales nicely, as he always does, though listlessly. 
But in the handling of such a robust, red-blooded 
subject as Flaubert the college professor was 
hardly a wise selection. The Faguet study is 
clear and painstaking but not sympathetic. Mr. 
James has praised it, possibly because Faguet 
agrees with him as to the psychology of Senti- 
mental Education. Not a study, Faguet's, for 
Flaubertians, who see the faults of their Saint 
Polycarp — his favourite self- appellation — and 
love him for his all-too-human imperfections. 

In 1845 Flaubert, on a visit to Italy, stopped 
at Genoa. There, in the Palace Balbi-Sena- 

132 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

rega — and not at the Doria, as Du Camp wrote, 
with his accustomed carelessness — the young 
Frenchman saw an old picture by Breughel 
(probably by Pieter the Younger, surnamed 
Hell-Breughel) that represents a temptation of 
Saint Antony. It is hardly a masterpiece, this 
Breughel, and is dingy in colour. But Flaubert, 
who loved the grotesque, procured an engraving 
of this picture and it hung in his study at Croisset 
until the day of his death. It was the spring- 
board of his own Temptation. The germ 
may be found in his mystery, Smarh, with its 
Demon and metaphysical colouring. Breughel 
set into motion the mental machinery of the 
Temptation that never stopped whirring until 
1874. The first brouillon of the Temptation 
was begun May 24, 1848, and finished Sep- 
tember 12, 1849. It numbered 540 pages of 
manuscript. Set aside for Bovary, Flaubert 
took up the draft again and made the second 
version in 1856. When he had done with it, the 
manuscript was reduced to 193 pages. Not 
satisfied, he returned to the work in 1872, and 
when ready for publication in 1874 the number 
of pages were 136. He even then cut, from ten 
chapters, three. Last year the French world 
read the second version of 1856 and was aston- 
ished to find it so different from the definitive 
one of 1874. The critical sobriety and courage 
of Flaubert were vindicated. In 1849, reading 
to Bouilhet and Du Camp, he had been advised 
to burn the stuff; instead he boiled it down for 

133 



EGOISTS 

the 1856 version. To Turgenev he had sub- 
mitted the 1872 draft, and thus it came that this 
wonderful coloured-panorama of philosophy, this 
Gulliver-like travelling amid the master ideas of 
the antique and the early Christian worlds, was 
published. 

All the youthful romantic Flaubert — the 
"spouter" of blazing phrases, the lover of jewelled 
words, of monstrous and picturesque ideas and 
situations — is in the first turbulent version of 
the Temptation. In the later version he is more 
critical and historical. Flaubert had grown in- 
tellectually as his emotions had cooled with the 
years. The first Temptation is romantic and 
religious; the 1874 version cooler and more 
sceptical. Dramatic, arranged more theatrically 
than the first, the author's affection for mysticism, 
the East, and the classic world shows more in this 
version. Psychologic gradations of character 
and events are clearer in the second version. I 
cannot agree with Louis Bertrand, who edited 
the 1856 version, that it is superior in interest to 
the 1874 version. It is a novelty, but Flaubert 
was never so much the surgeon as when he 
operated upon his own manuscript. He often 
hesitated, he always suffered, and he never 
flinched when his mind was finally satisfied. 
Faguet calls the Temptation an abstract pessi- 
mistic novel. He also complains that the phil- 
osophic ideas are not novel; a new philosophy 
would be a veritable phoenix. Why should they 
be? Flaubert does not enunciate a new philos- 

134 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

ophy. He is the artist who shows us apocalyptic 
visions of all philosophies, all schools, ethical 
systems, cultures, religions. The gods from 
every land defile by and are each in turn swept 
away by the relentless Button-Moulder, Oblivion. 
There was a talking and amusing pig in the first 
version; he is not present in the second — possibly 
because Flaubert discovered that it was not Saint 
Antony of Egypt, but Saint Antony of Padua, 
who had a pig. (Rops has remembered the 
animal in his etching of Flaubert's Antony.) 
The Antony of 1856 has a more modern soul; the 
second reveals the determinism of Flaubert. 
He is phlegmatic, almost stupid, a supine Faust in- 
capable of self-irony. Everything revolves about 
him — the multi-coloured splendours of Alex- 
andria, of the Queen of Sheba; Satan, Death 
and Luxury, Hilarion, Simon Magus and Apol- 
lonius of Tyana tempt him; upon his ears fall 
the enchanting phrases of the eternal dialogue 
between Sphinx and Chimera — we dream of 
the Songs of Solomon when reading: " Je cherche 
des parfums nouveaux, des fleurs plus larges, des 
plaisirs ineprouves"; the speech of the Chimera. 
Flaubert knew the Old Testament rhythms and 
beauty of phrase; witness this speech of Death's: 
"et on fait la guerre avec de la musique, des 
panaches, des drapeaux, des harnais d'or . . ." 
You seem to overhear the golden trumpets of 
Bayreuth. 

The demon retires baffled at the end of the 
first version. He is diabolic and not a little 

I3S 



EGOISTS 

theatrical. The Devil of 1874 is more artful. 
He shows Antony the Cosmos, but he is not the 
victor in the duel. The new Antony studies the 
protean forms of life and at the end is ravished 
by the sight of protoplasm. "O bliss!" he cries, 
and longs to be transformed into every species 
of energy, " to be matter." Then the dawn comes 
up like the uplifted curtains of a tabernacle — 
Flaubert's image — and in the very disc of the 
sun shines the face of Jesus Christ. " Antony 
makes the sign of the cross and resumes his pray- 
ers." Thus ends the 1874 edition, ends a book 
of irony, dreams, and sumptuous landscapes. 
A sense of the nothingness of human thought, 
human endeavour, assails the reader, for he has 
traversed all the metaphysical and religious ideas 
of the ages, has viewed all the gods, idols, demi- 
gods, ghosts, heresies, and heresiarchs; Jupiter 
on his throne and the early warring Christian 
sects vanish into smoke, crumble into the gulf 
of Neant. A vivid episode was omitted in the 
definitive version. At the close of the gods' 
procession the Saviour appears. He is old, 
white-haired, and weary from the burden of the 
cross and the sins of mankind. Some mock him; 
He is reproached by kings for propounding the 
equality of the poor; but by the majority He is 
unrecognised; and, spurned, the Son of Man falls 
into the dust of life. A poignant page, the spirit 
of which may be recognised in some latter-day 
French pictures and in the eloquent phrases of 
Jehan Rictus. M. Bertrand has pointed out 
136 




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reproduced from the original manuscript. 



THE REAL FLAUBERT 

that the 1849 version of the Temptation contains 
colour and imagery similar to the Legendes des 
Siecles, though written ten years before Hugo's 
poem. The Temptation of Saint Antony was 
neither a popular nor a critical success in 1874. 
France realises that in Flaubert's prose epic 
she has a masterpiece of intellectual power, pro- 
found irony, and unsurpassed beauty. The 
reader is alternately reminded of the Apocalypse, 
of Dante's grim visions, and of the second Faust. 

Almost numberless are the studies of Flaubert's 
method in composing his books. A small library 
could be filled by books about his style. We 
have seen the reproductions of the various drafts 
that he made in the description of Emma Bovary's 
visit to Rouen. Armand Weil, with a patience 
that is itself Flaubertian, has shown us the varia- 
tions in the manuscript of Salammbo (see, Revue 
Universitaire, April 15, 1902). Yet, compared 
with Balzac's spider-haunted, scribbled-over proofs, 
Flaubert's seem virginal of corrections. The one 
reproduced here is from two pages of original 
manuscript that I was lucky enough to secure at 
Paris in 1903. They contain instructions to the 
printer, as may be seen, and demonstrate Flau- 
bert's sharp eye; in every instance his changes 
are an improvement. One of the arguments in 
favour of the last version of the Temptation is 
its shrinkage in bulk from the 1856 manuscript. 
The letter, hitherto unpublished — for it will not 
be found in the six volumes of the Correspondence 

137 



EGOISTS 

— is possibly addressed to his niece, Caroline 
Hamard. Unusual for Flaubert is the absence 
of any date; he was scrupulous in giving hour, 
day, month, and year, in his letters. The princess 
referred to is the Princess Mathilde Bonaparte- 
Demidoff, the patron of artists and literary men, 
an admirer of Flaubert's. He often dined with her 
at Saint-Gratien. Madame Pasca the actress was 
also a friend and visited Croisset when he fractured 
his leg. He had a genius for friendships with 
both women and men. His mother, often tell- 
ing him that his devotion to style had dried up 
his natural affections, admitted that he had a 
bigger heart than head. And, after all, this 
motherly estimate gives us the measure of the 
real Flaubert. 



138 



IV 

ANATOLE FRANCE 



In the first part of that great, human Book, 
dear to all good Pantagruelists, is this picture: 
"From the Tower Anatole to the Messembrme 
were faire spacious galleries, all coloured over 
and painted with the ancient prowesses, his- 
tories and descriptions of the world.'' The 
Tower Anatole is part of the architecture of the 
Abbey of Theleme, in common with the other 
towers named, Artick, Calaer, Hesperia, and 
Caiere. 

For lovers of the exquisite and whimsical 
artist, Anatole France, a comparison to Rabelais 
may not appear strained. Anatole, the man, 
has written much that contains, as did the gracious 
Tower Anatole, " faire spacious galleries . . *. 
painted with ancient . . . histories." He has 
in his veins some infusion of the literary blood 
of that "bon gros libertin," Rabelais, a figure in 
French literature who refuses to be budged from 
his commanding position, notwithstanding the 
combined prestige of Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, 
Chateaubriand, Hugo, and Balzac. And the 

139 



EGOISTS 

gentle Anatole has a pinch of Rabelais's esprit 
gaulois, which may be found in both Balzac and 
Maupassant. 

To call France a sceptic is to state a common- 
place. But he is so many other things that he 
bewilders. The spiritual stepson of Renan, a 
partial inheritor of his gifts of irony and pity, and 
a continuator of the elder master's diverse and 
undulating style, France displays affinities to 
Heine, Aristophanes, Charles Lamb, Epicurus, 
Sterne, and Voltaire. The "glue of unanimity" 

— to use an expression of the old pedantic Budaeus 

— has united the widely disparate qualities of 
his personality. His outlook upon life is the out- 
look of Anatole France. His vast learning is 
worn with an air almost mocking. After the 
bricks and mortar of the realists, after the lyric 
pessimism of the morally and politically disil- 
lusioned generation following the Franco-German 
war, his genius comes in the nature of a consoling 
apparition. Like his own Dr. Trublet, in Histoire 
Comique, he can say: "Je tiens boutique de men- 
songes. Je soulage, je console. Peut-il consoler 
et soulager sans mentir ?" And he does deceive 
us with the resources of his art, with the waving 
of his lithe wand which transforms whales into 
weasels, mosques into cathedrals. 

Perhaps too much stress has been set upon his 
irony. Ironic he is with a sinuosity that yields 
only to Renan. It is irony rather in the shape of 
the idea, than in its presentation; atmospheric 
is it rather than surface antithesis, or the witty 

140 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

inversion of a moral order; he is a man of senti- 
ment, Shandean sentiment as it is at times. 
But the note we always hear, if distantly reverber- 
ant, is the note of pity. To be all irony is to 
mask one's humanity; and to accuse Anatole 
France of the lack of humanity is to convict one- 
self of critical colour-blindness. His writings 
abound in sympathetic overtones. His pity is 
without Olympian condescension. He is a most 
lovable man in the presence of the eternal spectacle 
of human stupidity and guile. It is not alone that 
he pardons, but also that he seeks to comprehend. 
Not emulating the cold surgeon's eye of a Flau- 
bert, it is with the kindly vision of a priest he 
studies the maladies of our soul. In him there 
is an ecclesiastical fond. He forgives because 
he understands. And after his tenderest bene- 
diction he sometimes smiles; it may be a smile of 
irony; yet it is seldom cruel. He is an adroit de- 
terminist, yet sets no store by the logical faculties. 
Man is not a reasoning animal, he says, and 
human reason is often a mirage. 

But to label him with sentimentalism a la 
russe — the Russian pity that stems from Dick- 
ens — would shock him into an outburst. Con- 
ceive him, then, as a man to whom all emotional 
extravagance is foreign; as a detester of rhetoric, 
of declamation, of the phrase facile; as a thinker 
who assembles within the temple of his creations 
every extreme in thought, manners, sentiment, 
and belief, yet contrives to fuse this chaos by the 
force of his sober style. His is a style more linear 

141 



EGOISTS 

than coloured, more for the eye than the ear; a 
style so pellucid that one views it suspiciously — 
it may conceal in its clear, profound depths strange 
secrets, as does some mountain lake in the shine 
of the sun. Even the simplest art may have its 
veils. 

In the matter of clarity, Anatole France is the 
equal of Renan and John Henry Newman, and 
if this same clarity was at one time a conven- 
tional quality of French prose, it is rarer in these 
days. Never syncopated, moving at a mod- 
erate tempo, smooth in his transitions, replete 
with sensitive rejections, crystalline in his diction, 
a lover and a master of large luminous words, 
limpid and delicate and felicitous, the very mar- 
row of the man is in his unique style. Few writers 
swim so easily under such a heavy burden of 
erudition. A loving student of books, his knowl- 
edge is precise, his range wide in many literatures. 
He is a true humanist. He loves learning for 
itself, loves words, treasures them, fondles them, 
burnishes them anew to their old meanings — 
though he has never tarried in the half-way house 
of epigram. But, over all, his love of humanity 
sheds a steady glow. Without marked dramatic 
sense, he nevertheless surprises mankind at its 
minute daily acts. And these he renders for us 
as candidly "as snow in the sunshine"; as the old 
Dutch painters stir our nerves by a simple shaft 
of light passing through a half-open door, upon 
an old woman polishing her spectacles. M. 
France sees and notes many gestures, inutile or 

142 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

tragic, notes them with the enthralling simplicity 
of a complicated artist. He deals with ideas so 
vitally that they become human; yet his characters 
are never abstractions, nor serve as pallid alle- 
gories; they are all alive, from Sylvestre Bonnard 
to the group that meets to chat in theForo Romano 
of Sur la Pierre Blanche. He can depict a cat 
or a dog with fidelity; his dog Riquet bids fair 
to live in French literature. He is an interpreter 
of life, not after the manner of the novelist, but 
of life viewed through the temperament of a 
tolerant poet and philosopher. 

This modern thinker, who has shed the despot- 
ism of the positivist dogma, boasts the soul of a 
chameleon. He understands, he loves, Christianity 
with a knowledge and a fervour that surprise 
until one measures the depth of his affection for 
the antique world. To further confuse our per- 
ceptions, he exhibits a sympathy for Hebraic lore 
that can only be set down to a remote lineage. 
He has rifled the Talmud for its forgotten stories; 
he delights in juxtaposing the cultured Greek and 
the strenuous Paul; he adores the contrast of 
Mary Magdalen with the pampered Roman 
matron. Add to this a familiarity with the pro- 
ceeds of latter-day science, astronomy in particular, 
with the scholastic speculation of the Renaissance, 
mediaeval piety, and the Pyrrhonism of a boule- 
vard philosopher. So commingled are these con- 
tradictory elements, so many angles are there 
exposed to numerous cultures, so many surfaces 
avid for impressions, that we end in admiring the 

143 



EGOISTS 

exercise of a magic which blends into a happy 
synthesis such a variety of moral dissonances, 
such moral preciosity. It is magic — though there 
are moments when we regard the operation as in- 
tellectual legerdemain of a superior kind. We sus- 
pect dupery. But the humour of France is not the 
least of his miraculous solvents; it is his humour 
that often transforms a doubtful campaign into 
a radiant victory. We see him, the protagonist 
of his own psychical drama, dancing on a tight 
rope in the airiest manner, capering deliciously in 
the void, and quite like a prestidigitator bidding 
us doubt the existence of his rope. 

His life long, Renan, despite his famous 
phrase, "the mania of certitude," was pursued 
by the idea of an absolute. He cried for proofs. 
To Berthelot he wrote: "I am eager for mathe- 
matics." It promised finality. As he aged, he 
was contented to seek an atmosphere of moral 
feeling; though he declared that "the real is a 
vast outrage on the ideal." He tremulously 
participated in the ritual of social life, and in the 
worship of the unknown god. He at last felt 
that Nature abhorred an absolute; that Being was 
ever a Becoming; that religion and philosophy 
are the result of a partial misunderstanding. All 
is relative, and the soul of man must ever feed 
upon chimeras! The Breton harp of Renan 
became sadly unstrung amid the shallow thunders 
of agnostic Paris. 

But France, his eyes quite open and smiling, 
gayly Pagan Anatole, does not demand proofs. 

144 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

He rejoices in a philosophic indifference, he has 
the gift of paradox. To Renan's plea for the 
rigid realities of mathematics, he might ask, with 
Ibsen, whether two and two do not make five on 
the planet Jupiter! To Montaigne's "What 
Know I?" he opposes Rabelais's "Do What 
Thou Wilt!" And then he adorns the wheel of 
Ixion with garlands. 

He believes in the belief of God. He swears 
by the gods of all times and climes. His is the 
cosmical soul. A man who unites in his tales 
something of the Mimes of Herondas, La Bruyere's 
Characters, and the Lucian Dialogues, with faint 
flavours of Racine and La Fontaine, may be par- 
doned his polygraphic faiths. With Baudelaire he 
knows the tremours of the believing atheist; with 
Baudelaire he would restrain any show of irreverence 
before an idol, be it wooden or bronze. It might 
be the unknown god! — as Baudelaire once cried. 

This pleasing chromatism in beliefs, a belief 
in all and none, is not a new phenomenon. The 
classical world of thought has several matches for 
Anatole France, from the followers of Aristippus 
to the Sophists. But there is a specific note of 
individuality, a roulade quite Anatolian in the 
Frenchman's writings. No one but this ac- 
complished Parisian sceptic could have framed 
The Opinions of Jerome Coignard and his 
wholly delightful scheme for a Bureau of Vanity; 
"man is an animal with a musket," he declares; 
Sylvestre Bonnard and M. Bergeret are new 
with a dynamic novelty. 

145 



EGOISTS 

As Walter Pater was accused of a silky dilettan- 
teism, so France, as much a Cyrenaic as the Eng- 
lish writer, was nevertheless forced to step down 
from his ivory tower to the dusty streets and there 
demonstrate his sincerity by battling for his con- 
victions. After the imbecile Dreyfus affair had 
rolled away, there was little talk in Paris of Ana- 
tole France, Epicurean. He was saluted with 
every variety of abuse, but this amateur of fine 
sensations had forever settled the charge of morose 
aloofness, of voluptuous cynicism. (Though to- 
day he is regarded with a certain suspicion by all 
camps.) At a similar point where the endurance 
of Ernest Renan had failed him, Anatole France 
proved his own faith. Renan during the black 
days of the Commune retired to Versailles, there 
to meditate upon the shamelessness of the brute, 
Caliban, with his lowest instincts unleashed. 
But France believes in the people, he has said 
that the future belongs to Caliban, and he would 
scout his master's conception of the Tyrant-Sage, 
a conception that Nietzsche partially transposed 
later' to the ecstatic key of the Superman. M. 
France would probably advocate the head-chop- 
ping of such wise monster-despots. An aristocrat 
by culture and fastidiousness, he is without an 
arriere-pensee of the snobbery of the intellect, of 
the cerebral exaltation displayed by Hugo, Baude- 
laire, and the Goncourts. 

When France published his early verse — his 
debut was as a poet and Parnassian poet — Catulle 
Mendes divined the man. He wrote, "I can 

146 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

never think of Anatole France . . . without 
fancying I see a young Alexandrian poet of the 
second century, a Christian, doubtless, who is 
more than half Jew, above all a neoplatonist, 
and further a pure theist deeply imbued with 
the teachings of Basilides and Valentinus, and 
the Perfumes of the Orphic poems of some recent 
rhetorician, in whom subtlety was pushed to 
mysticism and philosophy to the threshold of the 
Kabbalah." 

Some critics have accused him of not being able 
to build a book. He knows the rhythms of poems, 
but he "does not know" the harmony of essences, 
said the late Bernard Lazare; he is an excellent 
Parnassian but a mediocre philosopher: he is a 
charming raconteur, but he cannot compose a 
book. Precise in details, diffuse in ensembles, 
clear and confused, neat and ambiguous, con- 
tinued M. Lazare, he searches his object in con- 
centric circles. Furthermore, he has the soul 
of a Greek in the decadence, and the voice of a 
Sistine Chapel singer — pure and irresolute. 
To all this admission may be made without fear 
of decomposing the picture which France has 
set up before us of his own personality — a picture, 
however, he does not himself hesitate to efface 
from the canvas whenever his perversity prompts. 
He is all that his critic asserts and much more. 
It is this moral eclecticism, this jumble of op- 
posites, this violent contrast of traits, and these 
apparently irreconcilable elements of his char- 
acter, which appal, interest, yet make him so 

147 



EGOISTS 

human. But his art never swerves; it records 
invariably the fluctuations of his spirit, a spirit 
at once desultory, savant, and subtle, records all 
in a style, concrete and clairvoyant. 

His books are not so much novels as chronicles 
of designedly simple structure; his essays are 
confessions; his confessions, a blending of the 
naive and the corrupt, for there are corroding 
properties in these novel persuasive disenchant- 
ments. Upon the robust of faith Anatole France 
makes no more impression than do Augustine, 
Saint Teresa, the Imitation of Christ, or the 
Provincial Letters. Such nuances of scepticism 
as his are for those who love the comedies of 
belief and disbelief. Not possessing the Huys- 
mans intensity of temperament, France will never 
be betrayed into such affirmations; Huysmans, 
who dropped like a ripe plum into the basket of 
the ecclesiastical fruit-gatherer. France will 
never lose his balance in the fumes of a personal 
conversion. Of Plato himself he would ask: 
"What is Truth ?" and if Pilate posed the same 
question, France would reply by handing him 
his Jardin d'Epicure — a veritable breviary of 
scepticism. In Socrates he would discover a con- 
genial companion; yet he might mischievously 
allude to Montaigne "concerning cats," or quote 
Aristotle on the form of hats. A wilful child of 
philosophy and belles-lettres, he may be always 
expected to say the startling. 

Be humble! he exhorts. Be without intellec- 
tual pride! for the days of man, who is naught 

148 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

but a bit of animated pottery, are brief, and he 
vanishes like a spark. Thus Job — Anatole. 
Be humble! Even virtue may be unduly praised: 
"Since it is overcoming which constitutes merit, 
we must recognise that it is concupiscence which 
makes saints. Without it there is no repentance, 
and it is repentance which makes saints." To 
become a saint one must have been first a sinner. 
He quotes, as an example, the conduct of the 
blessed Pelagia, who accomplished her pilgrimage 
to Rome by rather unconventional means. Here, 
too, we recognise the amiable casuistry of Ana- 
tole — Voltaire. And there is something of 
Baudelaire and Barbey d'Aurevilly's piety of 
imagination with impiety of thought, in France's 
pronouncement. He is a Chrysostom reversed; 
from his golden mouth issue spiritual blasphemies, 
Mr. Henry James has said that the province 
of art is "all life, all feeling, all observation, all 
vision." According to this rubric, France is a 
profound artist. He plays w T ith the appearances 
of life, occasionally lifting the edge of the curtain 
to curdle the blood of his spectators by the sight 
of Buddha's shadow in some grim cavern beyond. 
He has the Gallic tact of adorning the blank 
spaces of theory and the ugly spots of reality. 
A student of Kant in his denial of the objective, 
we can never picture him as following Konigs- 
berg's sage in his admiration of the starry heavens 
and the moral law. Both are relative, would be 
the report of the Frenchman. But, if he is 
sceptical about things tangible, he is apt to dash 

149 



EGOISTS 

off at a tangent and proclaim the existence of 
that " school of drums kept by the angels," 
which the hallucinated Arthur Rimbaud heard 
and beheld. His method of surprising life, de- 
spite his ingenuous manner, is sometimes as 
oblique as that of Jules Laforgue. And, in the 
words of Pater, his is "one of the happiest temper- 
aments coming to an understanding with the 
most depressing of theories." 

For faith he yearns. He humbles himself 
beneath the humblest. He excels in picturing 
the splendours of the simple soul; yet faith has 
not anointed his intellect with its chrism. He 
admires the golden filigree of the ciborium; its 
spiritual essence escapes him. He stands at 
the portals of Paradise; there he lingers. He 
stoops to some rare and richly coloured feather. 
He eloquently vaunts its fabulous beauty, but 
he will not listen to the whirring of the wings from 
which it has fallen. Pagan in his irony, his pity 
wholly Christian, Anatole France has in him 
something of Petronius and not a little of Saint 
Francis. 



ISO 



ANATOLE FRANCE 



II 



Born to the literary life, one of the elect whose 
career is at once a beacon of hope and despair 
for the less gifted or less fortunate, Anatole 
Francois Thibault first saw the heart of Paris in 
the year 1844. The son of a bookseller, Noel 
France Thibault, his childhood was spent in and 
around his father's book-shop, No. 9 du quai 
Voltaire, and his juvenile memories are clustered 
about books. There are many faithful pictures 
of old libraries and book-worms in his novels. 
He has a moiety of that Oriental blood which is 
said to have tinctured the blood of Montaigne, 
Charles Lamb, and Cardinal Newman. The de- 
lightful Livre de Mon Ami gives his readers many 
glimpses of his early days. Told with incompara- 
ble naivete and verve, we feel in its pages the 
charm of the writer's personality. A portrait 
of the youthful Anatole reveals his excessive 
sensibility. His head was large, the brow was 
too broad for the feminine chin, though the long 
nose and firm mouth contradict the possible 
weakness in the lower part of the face. It was 
in the eyes, however, that the future of the child 
might have been discerned — they were lustrous, 
beautiful in shape, with the fulness that argued 
eloquence and imagination. He was, he tells us, 
a strange boy, whose chief ambition was to be a 
saint, a second St. Simon Stylites, and, later, the 
author of a history of France in fifty volumes, 
151 



EGOISTS 

Fascinating are the chapters devoted to Pierre 
and Suzanne in this memoir. His tenderness of 
touch and power of evoking the fairies of child- 
hood are to be seen in Abeille. The further de- 
velopment of the boy may be followed in Pierre 
Noziere. In college life, he was not a shining 
figure, like many another budding genius. He 
loved Virgil and Sophocles, and his professors 
of the Stanislas College averred that he was too 
much given to day-dreaming and preoccupied 
with matters not set forth in the curriculum, to 
benefit by their instruction. But he had wise 
parents — he has paid them admirable tributes 
of his love — who gave him his own way. After 
some further study in L'Ecole des Chartes, he 
launched himself into literature through the 
medium of a little essay, La Legende de Sainte 
Rad£gonde, reine de France. This was in 1859. 
Followed nine years later a study of Alfred de 
Vigny, and in 1873 Les Poemes dorees attracted 
the attention of the Parnassian group then under 
the austere leadership of Leconte de Lisle. 
Les Noces Corinthiennes established for him a 
solid reputation with such men as Catulle Mendes, 
Xavier de Ricard, and De Lisle. For this last- 
named poet young France exhibited a certain 
disrespect — the elder was irritable, jealous of 
his dignity, and exacted absolute obedience from 
his neophytes; unluckily a species of animosity 
arose between the pair. When, in 1874, he ac- 
cepted a post in the Library of the Senate, Leconte 
de Lisle made his displeasure so heavily felt that 

152 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

France soon resigned. But he had his revenge 
in an article which appeared in Le Temps, and 
one that put the pompous academician into a 
fury. Catulle Mendes sang the praises of the 
early France poems: "Les Noces Corinthiennes 
alone would have sufficed to place him in the 
first rank, and to preserve his name from the 
shipwreck of oblivion," declared M. Mendes. 

In 1 88 1, with The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard 
he won the attention of the reading world, a 
crown from the Academy, and the honour of being 
translated into a half-dozen languages. From 
that time he became an important figure in liter- 
ary Paris, while his reputation was further forti- 
fied by his criticisms of books — vagrom criticism, 
yet charged with charm and learning. He fol- 
lowed Jules Claretie on Le Temps, and there he 
wrote for five years (1886-1891) the critiques, 
which appeared later in four volumes, entitled 
La Vie Litteraire. Georg Brandes had said that, 
in the strict sense of the word, M. France is not 
a great critic. But Anatole France has said this 
before him. He despises pretentious official 
criticism, the criticism that distributes good and 
bad marks to authors in a pedagogic fashion. 
He may not be so " objective" as his one-time 
adversary, Ferdinand Brunetiere, but he is cer- 
tainly more convincing. 

The quarrel, a famous one in its day, seems 
rather faded in our days of critical indifference. 
After his clever formula, that there is no such 
thing as objective criticism, that all criticism but 

J 53 



EGOISTS 

records the adventures of one's soul among the 
masterpieces, France was attacked by Brunetiere 
— of whom the ever-acute Mr. James once re- 
marked that his " intelligence has not kept pace 
with his learning." Those critical watchwords, 
" subjective" and " objective," are things of 
yester-year, and one hopes, forever. But in this 
instance there was much ink spilt, witty on the 
part of France, deadly earnest from the pen of 
Brunetiere. The former annihilated his adversary 
by the mode metaphysical. He demonstrated that 
in the matter of judgment we are prisoners of 
our ideas, and he also formed a school that has 
hardly done him justice, for every impressionistic 
value is not necessarily valid. It is easy to send 
one's soul boating among masterpieces and call 
the result " criticism"; the danger lies in the con- 
tingency that one may not boast the power of 
artistic navigation possessed by Anatole France, 
a master steersman in the deeps and shallows of 
literature. 

His own critical contributions are notable. 
Studies of Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Renan, Bal- 
zac, Zola, Pascal, Villiers de l'lsle Adam, Bar- 
bey d'Aur.evjlly, Rabelais, Hamlet, Baudelaire, 
George Sand, Paul Verlaine — a masterpiece 
of intuition and sympathy this last — and many 
others, vivify and adorn all they touch. A critic 
such as Sainte-Beuve, or Taine, or Brandes, 
France is not; but he exercises an unfailing 
spell in everything he signs. His " august vaga- 
bondage" — the phrase is Mr. Whibley's — 

154 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

through the land of letters has proved a boon 
to all students. 

In 1897 he was received at the Academie 
Franjaise, as the successor of Ferdinand de Les- 
seps. His addresses at the tombs of Zola and 
Renan are matters of history. As a public 
speaker, France has not the fiery eloquence of 
Jean Jaures or Laurent Tailhade, but he dis- 
plays a cool magnetism all his own. And he is 
absolutely fearless. 

It is not through lack of technique that the 
structure of the France novels is so simple, his 
tales plotless, in the ordinary meaning of the 
word. Elaborate formal architecture he does not 
affect. The novel in the hands of Balzac, Flau- 
bert, Goncourt, and Zola would seem to have 
reached its apogee as a canvas upon which to 
paint a picture of manners. In the sociological 
novel, the old theatrical climaxes are absent, the 
old recipes for cooking character find no place. 
Even the love motive is not paramount. The 
genesis of this form may be found in Balzac, in 
whom all the modern fiction is rooted. Certain 
premonitions of the genre are also encountered in 
L' Education Sentimentale of Flaubert, with its 
wide gray horizons, its vague murmurs of the im- 
memorial mobs of vast cities, its presentation of 
undistinguished men and women. Truly demo- 
cratic fiction, by a master who hated democracy 
with creative results. 

Anatole France, Maurice Barres, Edouard 
Estaunie, Rosny (the brothers Bex), Rene 

155 



EGOISTS 

Bazin, Bertrand, and the astonishing Paul Adam 
are in the van of this new movement of fiction 
with ideas, endeavouring to exorcise the " demon 
of staleness." French fiction in the last decade 
of the past century saw the death of the natural- 
istic school. Paris had become a thrice-told tale, 
signifying the wearisome " triangle" and the 
chronicling of flat beer. Something new had to 
be evolved. Lo! the sociological novel, which 
discarded the familiar machinery of fiction, 
rather than miss the new spirit. It is unnecessary 
to add that in America the fiction of ideas has 
not been, thus far, of prosperous growth; indeed, 
it is viewed with suspicion. 

Loosely stated, the fiction of Anatole France 
may be divided into three kinds: fantastic, phil- 
osophic, and realistic. This arbitrary grouping 
need not be taken literally; in any one of his tales 
we may encounter all three qualities. For ex- 
ample, there is much that is fantastic, philosophic, 
real, in that moving and wholly human narrative 
of Sylvestre Bonnard. France's familiarity with 
cabalistic and exotic literatures, his deep love 
and comprehension of the Latin and Greek 
classics, his knowledge of mediaeval legends and 
learning, coupled with his command of supple 
speech, enable him to pvoject upon a ground-plan 
of simple narrative extraordinary variations. 

The full flowering of France's knowledge and 
imagination in things patristic and archaeologk 
is to be seen in Thais, a masterpiece of colour and 
construction. Thais is that courtesan of Alex- 

156 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

andrfe, renowned for her beauty, wit, and wick- 
edness, who was converted by the holy Paphnutius, 
saint and hermit of the Thebaid. How the devil 
finally dislodges from the heart of Paphnutius its 
accumulation of virtue, is told in an incompara- 
ble manner. If Flaubert was pleased by the first 
offering of his pupil, Guy de Maupassant, (Boule 
de Suif), what would he not have said after read- 
ing Thai's ? The ending of the wretched monk, 
following his spiritual victories as a holy man 
perched on a pillar — a memory of the author's 
youthful dream — is lamen table. He loves Thais, 
who dies; and thenceforth he is condemned to 
wander, a vampire in this world, a devil in the 
next. A monument of erudition, thick with pages 
of jewelled prose, Thais is a book to be savoured 
slowly and never forgotten. It is the direct parent 
of Pierre Loiiys's Aphrodite, and later evocations 
of the antique world. 

Of great emotional intensity is Histoire Comique 
(1903). It is a study of the histrionic tempera- 
ment, and full of the major miseries and petty 
triumphs of stage life. It also contains a startling 
incident, the suicide of a lovelorn actor. The 
conclusion is violent and morbid. The nature 
of the average actress has never been etched with 
such acrid precision. There are various tableaux 
of behind and before the footlights; a rehearsal, 
an actor's funeral, and the- life of the greenroom. 
Set forth in his most disinterested style, M. 
France shows us that he can handle with ease so- 
called "objective" fiction. His Doctor Trublet 

157 



EGOISTS 

is a new France incarnation, wonderful and kindly 
old consoler that he is. He is attached as house 
physician to the Odeon, and to him the comedians 
come for advice. He ministers to them body and 
soul. His discourse is Socratic. He has wit and 
wisdom. And he displays the motives of the 
heroine so that we seem to gaze through an open 
window. As vital as Sylvestre Bonnard, as 
Bergeret, Trublet is truly an avatar of Anatole 
France. Histoire Comique! The title is a rare 
jest aimed at mundane and bohemian vanity. 

Passing Jocaste et le Chat maigre, and Le 
Puits de Sainte-Claire, we come to L'Etui de 
Nacre, a volume of tales published in 1892. 
This book may be selected as typical of a certain 
side of its author, a side in which his fantasy and 
historic sense meet on equal terms. The most 
celebrated is Le Procurateur de Judee, who is 
none other than Pontius Pilate, old, disillusioned 
of public ambition, and grumbling, as do many 
retired public officers, at the ingratitude of gov- 
ernments and princes. To his friend he confesses 
finally, after his memory has been vainly prompted, 
that he has no recollection of Jesus, a certain anar- 
chistic prophet of Judea, condemned by him to 
death. His final phrases give us, as in the flare 
of lightning, the withering, double-edged irony 
of the author. He has quite forgotten the tre- 
mendous events that occurred in Jerusalem; for- 
gotten, too, is Jesus. Not all the stories that fol- 
low, not the pious records of Sainte Euphrosine, 
of Sainte Oliverie et Liberetta, of Amyeus and 
158 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

Celestin, of Scolastica, can rob the reader of this 
first cruel impression. In Balthasar the narra- 
tives are of a superior quality. Nothing could 
be better, for example, than the recital of the 
Ethiopian king who sought the love of Balkis, 
Queen of Sheba, was accepted, after proofs of 
his bravery, and then quietly forgotten. He 
studies the secrets of the spheres, and when Balkis, 
repenting of her behaviour, seeks Balthasar 
anew, it is too late. He has discovered the star 
of Bethlehem which leads him straightway to the 
crib in company with Gaspar and Melchior, 
there to worship the King of Kings. Powerful, 
too, in its fantastic evocation is La Fille de 
Lilith, which relates the adventure of a modern 
Parisian with a deathless daughter of Adam's 
first wife, Lilith, so named in the Talmud. Laeta 
Acilia tells us one of France's best anecdotes 
about a Roman matron residing at Marseilles dur- 
ing the reign of Tiberius. She encounters Mary 
Magdalen, who almost converts the woman by a 
promise of children, long desired. The con- 
clusion is touching. It discloses admirably the 
psychology of the two women. L'Oeuf Rouge 
is a tale of Caesarian madness, and the bizarre 
Le Reseda du Cure is so simply related that we 
are disarmed by the style. 

A graceful collection is that called Clio, illus- 
trated in the highly decorative manner of Mucha. 
Possibly the first is the best, a story of Homer. 
Some confess a preference for a Gaulish recital 
of the times when Caesar went to Britain. Na- 

159 



EGOISTS 

poleon, too, is in the list. An interesting dis- 
cussion of Napoleon and the Napoleonic legend 
is in a full-fledged novel, The Red Lily. "Na- 
poleon," says one of its characters, "was violent 
and frivolous; therefore profoundly human. . . . 
He desired with singular force, all that most men 
esteem and desire. He had the illusions which 
he gave to the people. He believed in glory. 
He retained always the infantile gravity which 
finds pleasure in playing with swords and drums, 
and the sort of innocence which makes good mil- 
itary men. It is this vulgar grandeur which 
makes heroes, and Napoleon is the perfect hero. 
His brain never surpassed his hand — that hand, 
small and beautiful, which crumpled the world. 
. . . Napoleon lacked interior life. . . . He lived 
from the outside." In the art of attenuating 
great reputations Anatole France has had few 
superiors. 

This novel displeased his many admirers, who 
pretend to see in it the influence of Paul Bourget. 
Yet it is a memorable book. Paul Verlaine is 
depicted in it with freshness, that poet Paul, and 
his childish soul so ironically, yet so lovingly dis- 
tilled by his critic. There are glimpses of Flor- 
ence, of Paris; the study of an English girl-poet 
will arouse pleasant memories of a lady well 
known to Italian, Parisian, and London art life. 
And there is the sculptor, Jacques Dechartres, 
who may be a mask, among many others of M. 
France. But Choulette- Verlaine is the lode- 
stone of the novel. 

160 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

Where the ingenuity and mental flexibility, 
not to say historical mimicry, of France are seen 
at their supreme, is in La Rotisserie de la Reine 
Pedauque. Jacques Tournebroche, or Turnspit, 
is an assistant in the cook-shop of his father, in 
old Paris. He is of a studious mind, and becomes 
the pupil of the Abbe Jerome Coignard, "who 
despises men with tenderness," a figure that might 
have stepped out of Rabelais, though baked and 
tempered in the refining fires of M. France's 
imagination. Such a man! Such an ecclesiastic! 
He adores his maker and admires His manifold 
creations, especially wine, women, and song. 
He has more than his share of human weakness, 
and yet you wonder why he has not been canon- 
ised for his adorable traits. He is a glutton and 
a wine-bibber, a susceptible heart, a pious and 
deeply versed man. Nor must the rascally friar 
be forgotten, surely a memory of Rabelais's 
Friar Jhon. There are scenes in this chronicle 
that would have made envious the elder Dumas; 
scenes of swashbuckling, feasting, and blood- 
shed. There is an astrologer who has about him 
the atmosphere of the black art with its imps and 
salamanders, and an ancient Jew who is the 
Hebraic law personified. So lifelike is Jerome 
Coignard that a book of his opinions was bound 
to follow. His whilom pupil Jacques is sup- 
posed to be its editor. Le Jardin d' Epicure and 
Sur la Pierre Blanche (1905) are an excuse for 
the opinions of M. France on many topics — 
religion, politics, science, and social life. Not- 

161 



EGOISTS 

withstanding their loose construction, they are 
never inchoate. That the ideas put forth may 
astound by their perversity, their novelty, their 
nihilism, their note of cosmic pessimism, is not 
to be denied. Our earth, "a miserable small 
star," is a drop of mud swimming in space, its 
inhabitants mere specks, whose doings are not of 
importance in the larger curves of the universe's 
destiny. Every illustration, geological, astro- 
nomical, and mathematical, is brought to bear 
upon this thesis — the littleness of man and the 
uselessness of his existence. But France loves 
this harassed animal, man, and never fails to 
show his love. Interspersed with moralising 
are recitals of rare beauty, Gallion and Par la 
Porte de Corne ou par la Porte dTvoire. Here 
the classic scholar, that is the base of France's 
temperament, fairly shines. 

In the four volumes of Histoire Contemporaine 
we meet a new Anatole France, one who has de- 
serted his old attitude of Parnassian impassi- 
bility for a suave anarchism, one who enters the 
arena of contemporaneous life bent on slaughter, 
though his weapon is the keen blade, never the 
rude battle-axe of polemics. It is "his first ven- 
ture in the fiction of sociology; properly speaking, 
it is the psychology of the masses, not exactly 
as Paul Adam handles it in his striking and tem- 
pestuous Les Lions (a book Balzacian in its fury 
of execution), but with the graver temper of the 
philosopher. He paints for us a provincial uni- 
versity town with its intrigues, religious, political, 
162 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

and social. The first of the series is L'O.rme du 
Mail; follow Le Mannequin d' Osier, L'Anneau 
d'Amethyste, and Monsieur Bergeret a Paris (1901). 
The loop that ensnares this quartet of novels is 
the simple motive of ecclesiastical ambition. 
Not since Ferdinand Fabre's L'Abbe Tigrane 
has French literature had such portraits of the 
priesthood ; Zola's ecclesiastics are ill-natured 
caricatures. The Cardinal Archbishop, Abb6 
Lataigne, and the lifelike Abbe Guitrel, with the 
silent, though none the less desperate, fight for 
the vacant bishopric of Turcoing — these are the 
three men who with Bergeret carry the story on 
their shoulders. About them circle the entire 
diocese and the tepid life of a university town. 
Yet anything further from melodramatic machina- 
tions cannot be imagined. Even the clerics of 
Balzac seem exaggerated in comparison. The 
protagonist is a professor, a master of conference 
of the University Faculty, a worthy man and 
earnest, though by no means of an exalted talent. 
He has the misfortune of being married to a 
worldly woman who does not attempt to under- 
stand him, much less to love him. She deceives 
him. The discovery of this deceit is an episode 
the most curious in fiction. It would be diverting 
if it were not painful. It reveals in Bergeret the 
preponderance of the man of thought over the 
man of action. His pupil and false friend is 
a classical scholar, therefore the affair might have 
been worse! And he is given the scholar's ex- 
cuse as a plea for forgiveness! But hesitating 

163 



EGOISTS 

as appears Bergeret, he utilises his wife's treachery 
as a springboard from which to fly his miserable 
household. Henceforth, with his devoted sister 
and daughter, he philosophises at ease and be- 
comes a Dreyfusard. His dog Riquet is the re- 
cipient of his deepest thoughts. His monologues 
in the presence of this animal are the best in the 
book. 

There are many characters in this serene and 
bitter tragi-comedy. A contempt, almost mo- 
nastic, peeps out in the treatment of his women. 
They are often detestable. They behave as if 
an empire was at stake, though it is only a con- 
spiracy whereby Abbe Guitrel is made Bishop of 
Turcoing. France always displays more pity 
for the frankly sinful woman than for the frivolous 
woman of fashion. There is also a subplot, the 
effort of a young Hebrew snob, Bonmont by 
name (Guttenberg, originally), to get into the 
exclusive hunting set of the Due de Brece. This 
hunt-button wins for the diplomatic Abbe Gui- 
trel his coveted see. M. France is unequalled 
in his portrayal of the modern French-Hebrew 
millionaire, the Wallsteins and Bonmonts. He 
draws them without parti-pris. His prefect, 
the easy-going, cynical Worms-Clavelin, with 
his secret contempt of Jews and Gentiles alike, 
and his wife who collects ecclesiastical bric-a-brac, 
are executed by a great painter of character. He 
exposes with merciless impartiality a mob of 
men and women in high life. But his aristocrats 
are no better than his ecclesiastics or bankers. 

164 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

There is a comic Orleanist conspiracy. There 
are happenings that set your hair on end, and a 
cynicism at times which forces one to regret that 
the author left his study to mingle with the world. 
Nor is the strain relieved when poor Bergeret goes 
to Paris; there he is enmeshed by the Dreyfus 
party. There he comes upon stormy days, though 
high ideals never desert him. He is as placid in 
the face of contemptuous epithets and opprobrious 
newspaper attacks as he was calm when stones 
were hurled at his windows in the provinces. 
A man obsessed by general ideas, he is lovable 
and never a bore, though M. Faguet and several 
other critics have cried him stupid. In the "fire 
of the footlights" M. Bergeret pales. For the 
drama M. France has no particular voice, though 
he has written several charming playlets. Even 
the superior acting of Guitry could not make of 
Crainquibille much more than a touching episode. 
There is enough characterisation and incident 
in Histoire Contemporaine to ballast a half-dozen 
novelists with material. And there are treasures 
of humour and pathos. The success of the 
series has been awe-inspiring; indeed, awe- 
inspiring is the success of all the France books, 
and at a time when Parisian prophets of woe are 
lamenting the decline of literature. Neverthe- 
less, here is a man who writes like an artist, whose 
work, web and woof, is literature, whose themes, 
with few exceptions, are not of the popular kind, 
whose politics are violently opposed to current 
superstition, whose very form is hybrid; yet he 

165 



EGOISTS 

sells, and has sold, in the hundreds of thousands. 
Literature cannot be called moribund in the face 
of such a result. His is a case that sets one specu- 
lating without undue emphasis upon a certain 
superiority of French taste over English in the 
matter of fiction. 

The Life of Jeanne d'Arc (1908), a work of 
scholarship and mixed prejudices, does not, I am 
forced to admit, unduly interest me. Whether 
the astonishing statements set forth therein are 
true is a question that may concern Mr. Lang, 
but hardly the lovers of the real Anatole. The 
Isle of Penguins (1908) gave him back to us in 
all his original glory. 

An art, ironical, easy, fugitive, divinely un- 
trammelled, divinely artificial, which, like a pure 
flame, blazes forth in an unclouded heaven . . . 
la gay a scienza; light feet; wit; fire; grace; the 
dance of the stars; the tremor of southern light; 
the smooth sea — these Nietzschean phrases 
might serve as an epigraph for the work of that 
apostle of innocence and experience, Anatole 
France. 



166 



THE PESSIMISTS PROGRESS 

J.-K. HUYSMANS 

"Ah! Seigneur, donnez-moi la force et le courage 
De contempler mon cceur et mon corps sans degout." 

— Baudelaire. 



Joris-Karl Huysmans has been called mystic, 
naturalist, critic, aristocrat of the intellect; he was 
all these, a mandarin of letters and a pessimist 
besides — no matter what other qualities persist 
throughout his work, pessimism is never absent; 
his firmament is clotted with black stars. He had 
a mediaeval monk's contempt for existence, con- 
tempt for the mangy flock of mediocrity; yet his 
genius drove him to describe its crass ugliness in 
phrases of incomparable and enamelled prose. 
It is something of a paradox that this man of 
picturesque piety should have lived to be the 
accredited interpreter, the distiller of its quintes- 
sence, of that elusive quality, " modernity." The 
"intensest vision of the modern world," as Have- 
lock Ellis puts it, Huysmans unites to the endow- 
ment of a painter the power of a rare psychologist, 

167 



EGOISTS 

superimposed upon a lycanthropic nature. A 
collective title for his books might be borrowed from 
Zola : My Hatreds. He hated life and its eternal 
betise. His theme, with variations, is a strangling 
Ennui. With those devoted sons of Mother 
Church, Charles Baudelaire, Barbey D'Aurevilly, 
Villiers de ITsle Adam, and Paul Verlaine ; 
eccentric sons whose actions so often dismayed 
their fellow worshippers of less genius, Huysmans 
has been affiliated. He was not a poet or, in- 
deed, a man of overwhelming imagination. But 
he had the verbal imagination. He did not possess 
the novelist's talent. His was not the flamboyant 
genius of Barbey, nor had he the fantastic inven- 
tion of Villiers. He seems closer to Baudelaire, 
rather by reason of his ironic, critical temperament 
than because of his creative gifts. Baudelaire's 
oriflamme, embroidered with preciously devised 
letters of gold, reads : Spleen and Ideal; upon the 
emblematic banner of Huysmans this motto is 
Spleen. His work at times seems like a prolonga- 
tion in prose of Baudelaire's. And by reason 
of his exacerbated temper he became the most 
personal writer of his generation. He belonged 
to no school, and avoided, after his beginnings, 
all literary groups. 

He is recording-secretary of the petty miseries 
and ironies of the life about him. Over ugliness 
he becomes almost lyric. "The world is a forest 
of differences." His pen, when he depicts an 
attack of dyspepsia or neuralgia, or the nervous 
distaste of a hypochondriac for meeting people, 

168 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

is like the triple sting of a hornet. He is the prose 
singer of neurasthenia, a Hamlet doubting his 
digestion, a Schopenhauer of the cook-shops. 
When he paints the nuance of rage and disgust that 
assails a middle-aged man at the sight of a burnt 
mutton-chop, his phrases are unforgettable. The 
tragedy of the gastric juices he has limned with 
a fulness of expression that almost lifts pathology 
to the dignity of art. A descendant of Flemish 
painters, sculptors, architects (Huysmans of 
Mechlin, the Antwerp-born painter of the seven- 
teenth century, is said to be a forebear), he in- 
herited their powers of envisaging exterior life; 
those painters for whom flowers, vegetable 
markets, butcher-shops, tiny gentle Dutch land- 
scapes, gray skies, skies of rutilant flames, and 
homely details were surfaces to be passionately 
and faithfully rendered. This vision he has in- 
terpreted with pen instead of brush. He is a 
virtuoso of the phrase. He is a performer on 
the single string of self. He knows the sultry 
enharmonics of passion. He never improvises, 
he observes. All is willed and conscious, the 
cold-fire scrutiny of a trained eye, one keen to 
note the ignoble or any deviation from the normal. 
His pages are often sterile and smell of the lamp, 
but he has the candour of his chimera. Well has 
Remy de Gourmont called him an eye. In his 
prose, he sacrifices rhythmic variety and tone to 
colour. His rhythms are massive, his colour at 
times a furious fanfare of scarlet. Every word, 
like a note in a musical score, has its value and 

169 



EGOISTS 

position. He intoxicates because of his marvel- 
lous speech, but he seldom charms. It is a sort 
of sinister verbal magic that steals upon one as 
this ancient mariner from the lower moral deeps 
of Paris fixes you with his glittering eye, and in 
his strangely modulated language tells tales of 
blasphemy and fish-wives' tales of a half-for- 
gotten river below the bed of the Seine, of dull 
cafes and dreary suburbs, of bored men and 
stupid women, of sordid, opulent souls, souls 
spongy and voluptuous, mean lives and meaner 
alleys — such an epic of ennui, mediocrity, 
bizzare sins, and neurotic, superstitious creatures 
was never given the world until Huysmans wrote 
Les Soeurs Vatard and A Rebours. Entire 
vanished districts of Paris may be reconstructed 
from his chapters. Zola declared, when Guy 
de Maupassant and Huysmans appeared side 
by side in Les Soirees de Medan, that the latter 
was the realist. 

The unity of form and substance in Huysmans 
is a distinguishing trait. He had early mastered 
literary technique, and the handling of his themes 
varies but little. There are, however, two or 
three typical varieties of description which may 
be quoted as illustrations of his etched and 
jewel-like prose. A cow hangs outside a butcher- 
shop: 

As in a hothouse, a marvellous vegetation flourished 
in the carcass. Veins shot out on every side like the 
trails of bindweed; dishevelled branch-work ex- 
tended itself along the body, an efflorescence of en- 

170 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

trails unfurled their violent-tinted corollas, and big 
clusters of fat stood out, a sharp white, against the 
red medley of quivering flesh. 

Surely a subject for Snyders or Jan Steen. 

Leon Bloy somewhere describes Huysmans's 
treatment of the French language as " dragging 
his images by the heels or the hair up and down 
the worm-eaten staircase of terrified syntax." 
Huysmans, in A Rebours, had called M. Bloy 
u an enraged pamphleteer whose style was at 
once exasperated and precious." And can mag- 
nificence of phrase in evoking a picture go further 
than the following which shows us Gustave 
Moreau's Salome: 

In the perverse odour of perfumes, in the overheated 
atmosphere of this church, Salome, her left arm ex- 
tended in a gesture of command, her bent right arm 
holding on the level of the face a great lotus, advances 
slowly to the sound of a guitar, thrummed by a 
woman who crouches on the floor. With collected, 
almost anguished countenance, she begins the lascivi- 
ous dance that should waken the sleeping senses of 
the aged Herod; her breasts undulate, become rigid 
at the contact of the whirling necklets; diamonds 
sparkle on the dead whiteness of her skin, her brace- 
lets, girdles, rings, shoot sparks; on her triumphal 
robes sewn with pearls, flowered with silver, sheeted 
with gold, the jewelled breast-plate, whose every 
stitch is a precious stone, bursts into flame, scatters 
in snakes of fire, swarms on the ivory-toned, tea-rose 
flesh, like splendid insects with dazzling wings, 
marbled with carmine, dotted with morning gold, 
diapered with steel blue, streaked with peacock green. 

171 



EGOISTS 

Gautier, — who was forHuysmans only a prodig- 
ious reflector — Flaubert, Goncourt, could not 
have excelled this verbal painting, this bronze 
and baroque prose, which is both precise and of a 
splendour. Huysmans can describe a herring 
as would a great master of sumptuous still-life : 

Thy garment is the palette of setting suns, the rust 
of old copper, the brown gilt of Cordovan leather, 
the sandal and saffron tints of the autumn foliage. 
When I contemplate thy coat of mail I think of Rem- 
brandt's pictures. I see again his superb heads, 
his sunny flesh, his gleaming jewels on black velvet. 
I see again his rays of light in the night, his trailing 
gold in the shade, the dawning of suns through dark 
arches. 

Or this invocation when Huysmans had begun 
to experience that shifting of moral emotion 
which we call his " conversion" — he was a 
Roman Catholic born, therefore was not con- 
verted; he but reverted to his early faith: 

Take pity, O Lord, on the Christian who doubts, 
on the sceptic who desires to believe, on the convict 
of life who embarks alone, in the night, beneath a sky 
no longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient faith. 

His method is not the recital of events, but the 
description of a situation; a scene, not a narra- 
tion, but large tableaux. Action there is little; 
he is more static than dynamic. His characters, 
like Goncourt's, suffer from paralysis of the will, 
from hyperesthesia. The soul in its primordial 

172 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

darkness interests him, and he describes it with 
the same penetrating prose as he does the carcass 
of an animal. He is a luminous mystic who 
speaks in terms of extravagant naturalism. A 
physiologist of the soul, at times his soul dwelt in 
a boulevard. His violent, vivid style so excellent 
in setting forth coloured sensations is equally 
admirable in the construction of metaphors 
which make concrete the abstract. There is the 
element of the grotesque, of the old, ribald Flem- 
ing, in Huysmans, though without a trace of hearty 
Flemish humour. He once said that the mem- 
ory of the inventor of card-playing ought to 
be blessed, the game kept closed the mouths of 
imbeciles. Nor is the pepper of sophistry ab- 
sent. He sculptures his ideas. He is both 
morose and fulgurating. He squanders his emo- 
tions with polychromatic resignation unlike a 
Saint Augustine or a Newman; yet we are not 
deeply moved by his soul-experiences. It is not 
vibrating sincerity that we miss; it would be 
wrong to question his return to Catholicism. 
He is more convincing than Tolstoy; for one 
thing, there was no dissonance between his daily 
life and his writings, after the publication of 
En Route. Lucid as is his manner, clairvoyant 
as the exposition of his soul at the feet of God, 
there is, nevertheless, an absence of unction, of 
tenderness, which repels. Sympathy and tender- 
ness are bourgeois virtues for Huysmans. Too 
complicated to admire, even recognise, the sane 
or the simple, he remained the morbid carper after 

173 



EGOISTS 

he entered La Trappe and Solesmes. As an 
oblate, his fastidiousness was wounded by the 
minor annoyances of a severe regimen; his 
stomach always ailed him. Perhaps to his weak 
digestion and a neuralgic tendency we owe the 
bitterness and pessimism of his art. He was not 
a normal man. He loathed the inevitable dis- 
cords of life with a startling intensity. The 
venomous salt of his wit he sprinkles over the 
raw turpitude of men and women. Woman for 
him was not of the planetary sex, but either a 
stupid or a vicious creature; sometimes both. 
Impassible as he was, he could be shocked into 
a species of sub-acid eloquence if the theme were 
the inutility of mankind. No Hebraic prophet 
ever launched such poignant phrases of disgust 
and horror at the world and its works. His 
favourite reading was in the mystics, a Kempis, 
Saint Theresa, St. John of the Cross, and the 
Flemish Ruysbroeck. 

In a new edition of A Rebours he has told us 
that he was not pious as a youth, having been 
educated not at a religious school. A Rebours 
came out in 1884, and it was in July, 1892, at the 
age of forty-four, that he went to La Trappe 
de Notre-Dame dTgny, situated near Fismes, 
and the Aisne and Marne. He confessed that 
he could not discover, during the eight inter- 
vening years, why he swerved to the Church of 
Rome. Diminution of vital energy was not 
the chief reason for his reversion. The opera- 
tions of divine grace in Huysmans's case may 
174 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

be dated back to A Rebours. The modulation 
by the way of art was not a difficult one. And 
he had the good taste of giving us his experiences 
in the guise of art. It is the history of a conver- 
sion, though he is, without doubt, the Durtal of 
the books. The final explosion of grace after 
years of unconscious mining, the definite illumina- 
tion on some unknown Road to Damascus, took 
place between the appearance of La Bas and 
En Route. We are spared the technique of faith 
reawakened. It had become part of his cerebral 
tissue. We are shown a Durtal, believer; also 
a Durtal profoundly disgusted with the oily, 
rancid food of La Trappe, and with the faces of 
some of his companions, and a Durtal who puffs 
surreptitious cigarettes. At Lourdes, in his last 
book, he is the same Durtal-Huysmans, grum- 
bling at the odours of unwashed bodies, at the per- 
spiring crowds, at the ignorance and cupidity 
of the shrine's guardians. A pessimist to the 
end. And for that reason he has often outraged 
the sensibilities of his coreligionists, who ques- 
tioned his sincerity after such an exclamation as: 
"How like a rind of lard I must look!" uttered 
when he carried a dripping candle in a religious 
procession. But through the dreary mists of 
doubtings and black fogs of unf aith the lamp of the 
Church, a shining point, drew to it from his chilly 
ecstasies this hedonist. Like Taine and Nietz- 
sche, he craved for some haven of refuge to escape 
the whirring wings of Wotan's ravens. And in 
the pale woven air he saw the cross of Christ. 

175 



EGOISTS 

Leslie Stephen wrote of Pascal: " Eminent 
critics have puzzled themselves as to whether 
Pascal was a sceptic or a genuine believer, having, 
I suppose, convinced themselves, by some process 
not obvious to me, that there is an incompatibility 
between the two characters." Huysmans may 
have been both sceptic and believer, but the dry 
fervour of the later books betrays a man who wil- 
lingly humiliates and depreciates the intellect 
for the greater glory of God. Abbe Mugnier says 
that his sincerity is itself the form of his talent. 
His portrait of Simon the swineherd in En Route 
is mortifying to humans with proud stomachs; 
Huysmans penetrates the husks and filth and sees 
only a God-intoxicated soul. Here is, indeed, 
the " treasure of the humble." At first, religion 
with Durtal was aesthetic, the beauty of Gothic 
architecture, the pyx that ardently shines, the 
bells that boom, the odours of frankincense that 
rolled through the nave of some old vast cathedral 
with flame-coloured windows. In L'Oblat the 
feeling has widened and deepened. The walls 
of life have fallen asunder, the soul glows in the 
twilight of the subliminal self, glows with a spirit- 
ual phosphorescence. Huysmans is nearer, though 
not face to face with, God. The object of his 
prayer is the Virgin Mary; to the hem of her robe he 
clings like a frightened child at its mother's dress. 
All this may have been auto-suggestion, or the result 
of the "will to believe," according to the formula 
of Professor William James, yet it was satisfying 
to Huysmans, whose life was singularly lonely. 

176 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

He was born on February 5, 1848, in Paris, 
and died in that city on May 12, 1907. Christened 
Charles-Marie- George, he signed his books Joris- 
Karl. He was educated at the Lyceum Saint- 
Louis. His family originally resided at Breda, 
Holland. His father was lithographer and paint- 
er. His mother was of Burgundian stock and 
boasted a sculptor in her ancestral line. Huys- 
mans came fairly by his love of art. He con- 
templated the profession of law; but, at the age 
of twenty, he entered the Ministry of the Interior, 
where he remained until 1897, a model, unassu- 
ming official, fond of first editions, posters, rare 
prints, and a few intimates. He went then to 
live at Liguge, but returned to Paris after the 
expulsion of the Benedictines. He was elected 
first president of the Academy Goncourt, April 
7, 1900. He was nominated chevalier of the 
Legion of Honour, and given the rosette of officer 
by Briand, though Huysmans begged that he 
should have no military honours at his funeral. 
It was for his excellent work as a civil servant 
that he was decorated, and not as a man of letters. 
At the time of his death, his reputation had suffered 
an eclipse; he was distrusted both by Catholics 
and free-thinkers. But he never wavered. At- 
tacked by a cancerous malady, he suffered the 
atrocious martyrdom of his favourite Saint Lyd- 
wine. Leon Daudet, Franfois Coppee, and 
Lucien Descaves were his unwearying attendants. 
At the last, he could still read the prayers for the 
dying. He was buried in his Benedictine habit. 

177 



EGOISTS 

But what an artist perished in the making of an 
amateur monk! 

"His face," said an English friend, "with the 
sensitive, luminous eyes, reminded one of Baude- 
laire's portrait, the face of a resigned and benevo- 
lent Mephistopheles who has discovered the ab- 
surdity of the divine order, but has no wish to 
make improper use of his discovery. He gave 
me the impression of a cat, courteous, perfectly 
polite, most amiable, but all nerves, ready to shoot 
out his claws at the least word." (Huysmans, like 
Baudelaire, was fond of cats). When I saw him 
five years ago in Paris, I was struck by the es- 
sentially Semitic contour of his head — some 
legacy of remote ancestors from the far-away 
Meuse. 

II 

As a critic of painting Huysmans revealed 
himself the possessor of a temperament that was 
positively ferocious in the presence of an unsym- 
pathetic canvas. His vocabulary and peculiar 
gift of invective were then exercised with astound- 
ing verbal if not critical results. Singularly nar- 
row in his judgments for a man of his general 
culture^ his intensity of vision concentrated itself 
upon a few painters and etchers; during the latter 
part of his life only religious art interested him, 
as had the exotic and monstrous in earlier years. 
And even in the former sphere he restricted his 
admiration, rather say idolatry, to a few men; he 
sought for character, an ascetic type of char- 

178 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

acter, the lean and meagre Saviours and saints 
of the Flemish primitives arousing in him a fire 
almost fanatical. Between a Roger Van der 
Weyden and a Giorgione there would be little 
doubt as to Huysmans 7 s choice; the golden colour- 
music of the great Venetian harmonist would 
have reached deaf ears. His Flemish ancestry 
told in his aesthetic tastes. He once said that he 
preferred a Leipsic man to a Marseilles man, 
"the big, phlegmatic, taciturn Germans to the 
gesticulating and rhetorical people of the south." 
Huysmans never betrayed the slightest interest 
in doctrines of equality; for him, as for Baude- 
laire, socialism, the education of the masses, or 
democratic prophylactics were hateful. The virus 
of the "exceptional soul" was in his veins. Noth- 
ing was more horrible to him than the idea of 
universal religion, universal speech, universal 
government, with their concomitant universal 
monotony. The world is ugly enough without 
the ugliness of universal sameness. Variety alone 
makes this globe bearable. He did not believe 
in art for the multitude, and the tableau of a 
billion humans bellowing to the moon the hymn 
of universal brotherhood made him shiver — as 
well it might. Tolstoy and his semi-idiotic 
mujik, to whom Beethoven was impossible, 
aroused in Huysmans righteous indignation. Art 
is for those who have the brains and patience to 
understand it. It is not a free port of entry for 
poet and philistine alike. To it, though many are 
called, few are chosen. So is it with religion. 

179 



EGOISTS 

That marvellous specimen of psychology, En 
Route, gave more offence to Roman Catholics 
than it did to sectarians of other faiths. Huys- 
mans was a mystic, and to his temperament, as 
taut as a finely attuned fiddle, the easy-going 
methods of the average worshipper were abso- 
lutely blasphemous. So he could write in En 
Route: "And he — Durtal — called to mind 
orators petted like tenors, Monsabre, Didon, 
those Coquelins of the Church, and, lower yet 
than those products of the Catholic training 
school, that bellicose booby the Abbe d'Hulst." 
That same abbe lived to see the writer repentant 
and, himself, not only to forgive, but to write 
eulogistic words of the man who had abused him. 
L'Art Moderne was published between covers 
in 1883. It deals with the official salons of 1879, 
1880-81 and the exposition of the Independents, 
1880-81. The appendix, 1882, contains thumb- 
nail sketches of Caillebotte, whose bequest to 
the Luxembourg of impressionistic paintings, 
including Manet's Olympe, stirred all artistic 
and inartistic Paris; Gauguin, Mile. Morisot, 
Guillaumin, Renoir, Pissaro, Sisley, Claude 
Monet, "the marine painter par excellence"; 
Manet, Roll, Redon, all men then fighting the 
stream of popular and academic disfavour. 
Since Charles Baudelaire's Salons, no volume on 
the current Paris exhibitions has appeared of 
such solid knowledge and literary power as Huys- 
mans's. Admitting his marked prejudices, his 
numerous dogmatic utterances, there is never- 

180 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

theless an attractive artistic quality backed up 
by the writer's stubborn convictions that persuade 
where the more liberal and brilliant Theophile 
Gautier never does. "Theo," who said that if 
he pitched his sentences in the air they always fell 
on their feet, like a cat, leaned heavily on his 
verbal magic. But even in that particular he is 
no match for Huysmans, who, boasting the blood of 
Fleming painters, sculptors, and architects, uses 
his pen as an artist his brush. Take another 
bit from his study of Moreau's Salome: 

"A throne, like the high altar of a cathedral, 
rose beneath innumerable arches springing from 
columns, thick-set as Roman pillars, enamelled 
with varicoloured bricks, set with mosaics, en- 
crusted with lapis-lazuli and sardonyx in a pal- 
ace like the basilica of an architecture at once 
Mussulman and Byzantine. In the centre of 
the tabernacle surmounting the altars, fronted 
with rows of circular steps, sat the Tetrarch 
Herod, the tiara on his head, his legs pressed to- 
gether, his hands on his knees. His face was 
yellow, parchmentlike, annulated with wrinkles, 
withered by age; his long beard floated like a 
cloud on the jewelled stars that constellated the 
robe of netted gold across his breast. Around 
this statue, motionless, frozen in the sacred pose 
of a Hindu god, perfumes burned, throwing out 
clouds of vapour, pierced, as by the phospho- 
rescent eyes of animals, by the fire of precious 
stones set in the sides of the throne; then the 
vapour mounted, unrolling itself beneath arches 

181 



EGOISTS 

where the blue smoke mingled with the powdered 
gold of great sun-rays fallen from the dome." . . . 
And of Salome he writes: "In the work of Gus- 
tave Moreau, conceived on no Scriptural data, 
Des Esseintes saw at last the realisation of the 
strange, superhuman Salome that he had dreamed. 
She was no more the mere dancing girl . . . she 
had become the symbolic deity of indestructible 
Lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria; the 
monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible 
Beast, poisoning like Helen of old all that go near 
her, all that look upon her, all that she touches.' ' 

Not only is there an evocation of material 
splendour in the above passages taken from 
A Rebours, but a note of cenobitic contempt for 
woman's beauty, which sounds throughout the 
books of Huysmans. It may be heard at its 
deepest in his study of Felicien Rops, the Belgian 
etcher and painter, who interpreted Baudelaire's 
jemmes damnees. Rops, too, regarded woman 
in the light of a destroyer, a being banned by the 
early fathers of the Church, the matrix of sin. 
Huysmans's incomparable study of Rops — whose 
great powers have never been fully recognized 
because of his erotic and diabolic subjects — may 
be found in his Certains (1889). 

In his description of the Independent exposition 
(1880) to which Degas, Mary Cassatt and Berthe 
Morisot, Forain, and others sent canvases, 
Huysmans drifts into literary criticism; he saw 
analogies between the paintings of the realists, 
impressionists, and the modern men of fiction, 
182 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

Flaubert, Goncourt, Zola. "Have not," he 
asks, "the Gon courts fixed in a style deliberate 
and personal, the most ephemeral of sensations, 
the most fugacious of nuances ?" So, too, have 
Manet, Monet, Pissaro, Raffaelli. Nor does he 
hesitate to make the avowal, still incomprehensible 
for those who are deceived by the prodigious 
blaring of critical trumpets, that Baudelaire is 
a true poet of genius; and that the chef d'ceuvre 
of fiction is Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale. 
Naturally Edgar Degas is the only psychological 
interpreter of latter-day life. There is also a 
careful analysis of Manet's masterpiece, the Bar 
at the Folies-Bergeres. Huysmans recognised 
Manet's indebtedness to Goya. 

Certains is a valuable volume. Therein are 
Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, Degas, 
Bartholome, Raffaelli, Stevens, Tissot, Wagner 
— the painter, not the composer; Huysmans 
admits but one form in music, the Plain Chant — 
Cezanne, Cheret, Whistler — which true to the 
tradition of Parisian carelessness is spelled 
"Wisthler," as Liszt years before was called 
"Litz" — Rops, Jan Luyken, Millet, Goya, 
Turner, Bianchi, and other men. He gives to 
Millet his just meed of praise, no more — he 
views him as a designer rather than as a great 
painter. We get Huysmans in his quintessence. 
Scattered through his novels — if one may dare 
to ascribe this title to such an amorphous form — 
there are eloquent and burning pages devoted 
to various painters, but not with the amplitude 

183 



EGOISTS 

and cool science displayed in his studies of Degas, 
Moreau, Rops, The Monster in Art — a mon- 
strous subject masterfully handled — and Whis- 
tler. He literally discovered Degas, and in future 
books on rhetoric surely Huysmans's descriptions 
of Degas's old workwomen sponging their creased 
backs cannot be excluded without doing violence 
to the expressive powers of the French language. 
His eye mirrored the most minute details — in 
that he was Dutch-Flemish; the same merci- 
less scrutiny is pursued in the life of the soul — 
he was Flemish and Spanish: Ruysbroeck and 
St. John of the Cross, mystics both, with an 
amazing sense of the realistic. 

Without a spacious imagination, Huysmans was 
a man of the subtlest sensibilities. There is a 
wealth of critical divination in his studies of Moreau 
and Whistler. Twenty or thirty years ago it was 
not so easy to range these two enigmas. Huys- 
mans did so, and, in company with Degas and 
Rops, placed them so definitely that critics have 
paraphrased his ideas ever since. Baudelaire 
had recognised the glacial genius of Rops; 
Huysmans definitely consecrated it in Certains. 
For Huysmans the theme of love aroused his mor- 
dant wit — Flaubert, Goncourt, Baudelaire were 
all summoned at one time or another in their 
respective careers to answer the charge of poi- 
soning public morals! And what malicious com- 
mentaries were drawn and etched by the versa- 
tile Rops. 

Extraordinary as are Rops's delineations of 
184 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

Satan, the prose of Huysmans is not less graphic 
in interpreting the etched plate. In De Tout 
(1901) there is, literally, a little about everything. 
Not only are several unknown quarters of Paris 
sketched with a surprising freshness, but Huys- 
mans goes far afield for his themes. He studies 
sleeping-cars and the sleepy city Bruges, the 
aquarium at Berlin — "most fastidious and 
most ugly" — the Gobelins, Quentin Matsys 
at Antwerp; but whether in illustrating with his 
pen the mobs at Lourdes or the intimate habits 
of a Parisian cafe, he never fails to achieve the 
exact phrase that illuminates. Nor is it all crass 
realism. His eye, the eye of a visionary as well 
as of a painter, penetrates to the marrow of the 
soul. 

A Rebours is the history of a decadent soul in 
search of an earthly paradise. His palace of 
art is near Paris, and in it the Due des Esseintes 
assembles all that is rare, perverse, beautiful, 
morbid, and crazy in modern art and literature. 
A Rebours is in reality a very precious work of 
criticism by a distinguished critical temperament, 
written in a prose jewelled and shining, sharp as 
a Damascene dagger. This French writer's ad- 
miration for Moreau has been mentioned. Luy- 
ken comes in for his share; the bizarre Luyken 
of Amsterdam (1649-17 12). Odilon Redon, the 
lithographer and illustrator of Poe, is lauded by 
Des Esseintes. Redon's work is not lacking in 
subtlety, and it is sometimes disagreeable; possi- 
bly the latter quality is aimed at by the painter. 

185 



EGOISTS 

Redon certainly had in Poe a congenial subject; 
in Baudelaire also, for he has accomplished some 
shivering plates commemorating Fleurs du Mai. 
Not such intractable reading as L'Oblat, withal 
difficult enough, is The Cathedral, which abounds 
in glorious chapters devoted to ecclesiastical paint- 
ing, sculpture, and architecture. "It" — the 
Cathedral — "was as slender and colourless as 
Roger Van der Weyden's Virgins, who are so 
fragile, so ethereal, that they might blow away 
were they not held down to earth by the weight 
of their brocades and trains," is a passage in 
this storehouse of curious liturgical learning. 
Matsys, Memling, Dierck Bouts, Van der Wey- 
den, painted great religious pictures because 
they possessed a naive faith. Nowadays your 
painter has no faith; better, then, stick like Degas 
to ballet-girls and not soil canvas with profane 
burlesques. Always extreme, Huysmans jumped 
from the worldly audacities of Manet to the re- 
bellious Christ of Griinewald. Van Eyck touched 
him where Van Dyck did not. He disliked the 
" supersensual and sublimated Virgins of Cologne," 
and pronounced Botticelli's Virgins masquer- 
ading Venuses. The Van der Weyden triptych 
of the Nativity in the old museum, Berlin, 
filled him with raptures, pious and aesthetic. 
The "theatrical crucifixions, the fleshly coarse- 
ness of Rubens" are naught when compared 
to the early Flemings. His pages on Rembrandt 
are admirable* reading, "Rembrandt, who had 
the soul of a Judaising Protestant . . . with his 

186 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

serious but fervid wit, his genius for concentra- 
tion, for getting a spot of the essence of sunlight 
into the heart of darkness . . . has accomplished 
great results; and in his Biblical scenes has 
spoken a language which no one before him had 
attempted to lisp." As Huysmans loathed the 
rancid and voluptuous " sacred" music of Gounod 
and other comic-opera writers of masses and 
hymns in the Church, so he abominated the 
modern "sacred" painters. James Tissot and 
Munkacsy come in for a critical flagellation. 
What could be more dazzling than his account 
of a certain stained-glass window in his beloved 
Cathedral at Chartres: 

"Up there high in the air, as they might be 
Salamanders, human beings, with faces ablaze 
and robes on fire, dwelt in a firmament of glory; 
but these conflagrations were enclosed and limited 
by an incombustible frame of darker glass which 
set off the youthful and radiant joy of the flames 
by the contrast of melancholy, the suggestion of 
the more serious and aged aspect presented by 
gloomy colouring. The bugle-cry of red, the 
limpid confidence of white, the repeated hallelu- 
jahs of yellow, the virginal glory of blue, all the 
quivering crucible of glass was dimmed as it 
neared this border dyed with rusty red, the tawny 
hues of sauces, the harsh purples of sandstone, 
bottle green, tinder brown, fuliginous blacks, and 
ashy grays." Not even Arthur Rimbaud, in 
his half -jesting sonnet on the "Vowels," in- 
dulged in such daring colour symbolism as Huys- 

187 



EGOISTS 

mans. For a specimen of his most fulgurating 
style read his Camieu in Red, in a little volume 
edited by Mr. Howells entitled Pastels in Prose, 
and translated by Stuart Merrill. 

"To be rich, very rich, and found in Paris in 
face of the triumphal ambulance, the Luxem- 
bourg, a public museum of contemporary paint- 
ing!" he cries in one of his essays. He was the 
critic of Modernity, as Degas is its painter, 
Goncourt its exponent in fiction, Paul Bourget 
its psychologist. He lashes himself into a fine 
rage over the enormous prices paid some years 
ago by New York millionaires for the work of 
such artists as Bouguereau, Dubufe, Gerome, 
Constant, Rosa Bonheur, Knaus, Meissonier. 
The Christ before Pilate, sold for 600,000 francs, 
sets him fulminating against its painter. "Cet 
indigent decor brosse par le Bresilien de la 
piete, par le rastaquouere de la peinture, par 
Munkacsy." 

Joris-Karl Huysmans should have been a 
painter; his indubitable gift for form and colour 
were by some trick of nature or circumstance 
transposed to literature. So he brought to the 
criticism of pictures an eye abnormal in its keen- 
ness, and to this was superadded an abnormal 
power of expression. 

After reading his Three Primitives you may 
be tempted to visit Colmar, where hang in the 
museum several paintings by Mathias Grune- 
wald, who is the chief theme of the French writer's 
book. Colmar is not difficult to reach if you are 

188 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

in Paris, or pass through Strasburg. It is a 
town of over 35,000 inhabitants, the capital of Up- 
per Alsace and about forty miles from Strasburg. 
There are several admirable specimens of the 
Rhenish school there, Van Eyck and Martin 
Schongauer (born 1450 in Colmar), the great en- 
graver. His statue by Bartholdi is in the town, 
and, as Huysmans rather delicately puts it, is 
an " emetic for the eyes." He always wrote what 
he thought, and notwithstanding the odour of 
sanctity in which he departed this life, his 
name and his books are still anathema to 
many of his fellow Catholics. But as to the qual- 
ity of this last study there can be no mistake. 
It is masterly, revealing the various Huysmanses 
we admire: the mystic, the realist, the penetra- 
ting critic of art, and the magnificent tamer of 
language. Hallucinated by his phrases, you 'see 
cathedrals arise from the mist and swim so close 
to you that you discern every detail before the 
vision vanishes; or some cruel and bloody can- 
vas of the semi-demoniacal Griinewald, on which 
a hideous Christ is crucified, surrounded by 
scowling faces. The swiftness in executing the 
verbal portrait allows you no time to wonder over 
the method; the evocation is complete, and after- 
ward you realise the magic of Huysmans. 

In his La Bas he described the Griinewald 
Crucifixion, once in the Cassel Museum, now 
as Carlsruhe. A tragic realism invests this work 
of Griinewald, who is otherwise a very unequal 
painter. Huysmans puzzled over the Bavarian, 

189 



EGOISTS 

who was probably born at Aschaffenburg. Sund- 
vart, Waagen, Goutzwiller, and Passavant have 
written of him. He was born about 1450 and 
died about 1530. He lived his later years in Ma- 
yence, lonely and misanthropic. Every one speaks 
of Diirer, the Cranachs, Schongauer, Holbein, 
but even during his lifetime Griinewald was not 
famous. To-day he is esteemed by those for 
whom the German and Belgian Primitives mean 
more than all Italian art. There is a bitterness, 
a pessimism, a delight in torture for the sake of 
torture in Griinewald's treatment of sacred sub- 
jects that must have shocked his more easy-going 
contemporaries. Huysmans, as is his wont, does 
not spare us in his recital of the horrors of that 
Colmar Crucifixion. For me the one now at 
Carlsruhe suffices. It causes a shudder, and 
some echo of the agony of the Passion permeates 
that solemn scene. Griinewald must have been 
a painter of fierce and exalted temperament. 
His Christs are ugly — the ugliness symbolical 
of the sins of the world ; — this doctrine was up- 
held by Tertullian and Cyprian, Cyril and St. 
Justin. 

And the cadaverous flesh tones! Such is his 
fidelity, a fidelity almost pathologic, that two such 
eminent men as Charcot and Richet testified, 
after study, to the too painful verity of this early 
German's brushwork. He depicted with shock- 
ing realism the malady known as St. Anthony's 
Fire, and a still more pathological interpretation 
by Huysmans follows. But he warmly praises 

190 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

the fainting mother, one of the noble figures in 
German art. We allude now to the Colmar 
Crucifixion, with its curious introduction of St. 
John the Baptist in Golgotha, and the dark 
landscape through which runs a gloomy river. 
Fainting Mary, the mother of Christ, is upheld 
by the disciple John. There is a mysterious 
figure of a girl, an ugly but sorrowful face, and 
the lamb bearing the cross is at the foot of the 
cross. Audacious is the entire composition. 
It wounds the soul, and that is what Griinewald 
wished. His harsh nature saw in the crucifixion 
not a pious symbol but the death of a god, an 
unjust death. So he fulminates upon his canvas 
his hatred of the outrage. How tender he can 
be we see in this Virgin. 

On the back of this polyptique are a Resur- 
rection and Annunciation. The latter is bad. 
The former is a dynamic picture representing 
Christ in a vast aureole arising to the sky, His 
guards tumbled over at the side of the tomb. 
There is an explosion of luminosity. Christ's 
face is radiant; He displays his palms upward, 
pierced by the nails. The floating aerial effect 
and the draperies are wonderfully handled. 
The museum wherein hang these works was 
formerly a convent of nuns, founded in 1232, and 
in 1849 turned into a museum. Huysmans 
rages, of course, over the change. 

He finds among the Griinewalds at Colmar — 
there are nine in all — a St. Anthony bearded, 
that reminds him of a Father Hecker born in 

191 



EGOISTS 

Holland. What a simile, made by a man who 
probably never saw the American priest, except 
pictured ! 

He visits Frankfort-on-the-Main, and after- 
ward, characteristically pouring his vials of wrath 
upon this New Jerusalem, he visits the Staedel 
Museum and goes into ecstasies over that lovely 
head of a young woman called the Florentine, 
by an unknown master. Though he admires 
the Van der Weyden, the Bouts, and the Virgin 
of Van Eyck, he really has eyes only for this 
exquisite, vicious androgynous creature and for 
the Virgin by the Master of Flemalle. After 
a vivid description of the Florentine Cybele he 
inquires into her artistic paternity, waving aside 
the suggestion that one of the Venezianos painted 
her. But which one? There are over eleven, 
according to Lanzi. Huysmans will not allow 
Botticelli's name to be mentioned, though he 
discerns certain Botticellian qualities. But he 
has never forgiven Botticelli for painting the 
Virgin looking like the Venus, and he hates the 
paganism of the Renaissance with an early 
Christian fervour. (Fancy the later Joris-Karl 
Huysmans and the early Walter Pater in a dis- 
cussion about the Renaissance.) Huysmans him- 
self was a Primitive. Much that he wrote would 
have been understood in the Middle Ages. The 
old Adam in this Fleming, however, comes to the 
surface as he conjectures the name of the enig- 
matic heroine. Is it that Giulia Farnese, called 
"Giulia la bella" — puritas impuritatis — who 
• 192 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

became the favourite of Pope Alexander VI. ? If 
it is — and then Huysmans writes some pages of 
perfect prose which suggest joyful depravity, as 
depraved as the people he paints with such mar- 
vellous colour and precision. It is a peep be- 
hind the scenes of a pagan Christian Rome. 

The Master of Flemalle, whose Virgin he 
describes at the close of this volume, was the 
Jacques Daret born in the early years of the 
fifteenth century, a fellow student of Roger van 
der Weyden under Camp in at Tournay. We 
confess that, while we enjoy the verbal rhapsodies 
of the author, we were not carried away by this 
stately Virgin and Child by Daret, though there 
are many Darets that once passed as the work of 
Roger van der Weyden. It has not the sweet 
melancholy, this picture, of Hans Memlinc's 
Madonnas, and the Van Eyck in the same gal- 
lery, as well as the Van der Weyden, are both 
worth a trip across Europe to gaze upon. How- 
ever, on the note of a rapt devotion Huysmans 
ends his book. The first edition, illustrated, was 
published in 1905, by Vanier-Messein. But 
there is a new (1908) edition, published by Plon, 
at Paris, and called Trois Eglises et Trois Primi- 
tifs. This latter is not illustrated. The three 
churches discussed are Notre Dame de Paris and 
its symbolism, Saint Germain-l'Auxerrois, and 
Saint Merry. 

Poor, unhappy, suffering Huysmans! He trod 
the Road to Damascus on foot and not in a 
pleasant motor-car like several of his successors. 

193 



EGOISTS 

The intimate side of the man, so hidden by him, 
is now being revealed to us by his friends. Re- 
cently, in the Revue de Paris, Mme. Myriam 
Harry, the writer of The Conquest of Jerusalem, 
tells us of her friendship with Huysmans, with a 
rather sentimental anecdote about his weeping 
over a dead love. When she met him he was 
already attainted with the malady which tortured 
him to the end. A lifetime sufferer from neuralgia 
and dyspepsia, he was half blind for a few months 
before his death. He touchingly alludes to his 
illness as both a punishment and a reparation for 
things he wrote in his Lourdes. In a letter dated 
January 5, 1907, he avows that nothing is more 
dangerous than to celebrate sorrow; all his books 
celebrate the physical miseries of life, the sorrows 
of the soul. Humbly this great writer admits 
that he must pay for the pages of that cruel book, 
the life of Sainte-Lydwine. The disease he so 
often described came to him at last and slew him. 



Ill 



To traverse the books of Huysmans is a true 
pessimistic progress; from Le Drageoir aux 
Epices (1874) to Les Foules de Lourdes (1906), 
the note, at times shrill, often profound, is never 
one of dulciiication. The first book, a veritable 
little box of spices, was modelled on Baudelaire's 
Poemes en Prose, but revealed to the acute critic 
a new personal shade. Its plainness is Gallic. 
That amusing, ironic sketch, L'Extase, gives 

194 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

us a key-note to the writer's disillusioned soul. 
Marthe (1876) caused a sensation. It was 
speedily suppressed. La Fille Elise and Nana 
the public could endure; but the cold-blooded 
delineation of vice in this first novel was too 
much for the Parisian, who likes a display of 
sentiment or sympathy in the treatment of 
unsavoury themes. Now, sympathy for sin or 
suffering is missing in Huysmans. Slow veils of 
pity never descend upon his sufferers. Like 
a surgeon who will show you a " beautiful 
disease," a " classic case," he exposed the life of 
the wretched Mkrthe, and, while he called a cat 
a cat, he forgot that certain truths are unfit for 
polite ears accustomed to the rotten-ripe Dumas 
fils, or the thrice-brutal Zola. It was in Marthe 
that Huysmans proclaimed his adherence to 
naturalism in these memorable words: "I write 
what I see, what I feel, and what I have ex- 
perienced, and I write it as well as I can : that is 
all." This rubric he adhered to his life long, 
despite his change of spiritual base. He also said 
that there are writers who have talent, and others 
who have not talent. All schools, groups, cliques, 
whether romantic or naturalistic or decadent, need 
not count. 

It was 1880 before Huysmans was again heard 
from, this time in collaboration with Zola, Guy 
de Maupassant, Henry Ceard, Leon Hennique, 
and Paul Alexis. Les Soirees de Medan was 
the inappropriate title of a book of interesting 
tales. Huysmans's contribution, Sac au Dos, is 

195 



EGOISTS 

a story of the Franco-Prussian war that would 
have pleased Stendhal by its sardonic humour. 
The hero never reaches the front, but spends his 
time in hospitals, and the nearest he gets to the 
glory of war is a chronic stomach-ache. The 
variations on this ignoble motive showed the 
malice of Huysmans. War is not hell, he says in 
effect, but dysentery is; how often a petty ailing 
has unmade a heroic soul. Yet in the Brussels 
edition of this story there was published the fol- 
lowing verse — the author seldom wrote poetry; 
he was hardly a poet, but as indicating certain 
religious preoccupations it is worth repeating: 

"O croix qui veux V austere, 6 chair qui veux le doux, 
O monde, 6 evangile, immortels adversaires, 
Les plus grands ennemis sont plus d' accord que vous, 
Et les poles du ciel ne sont pas plus contraires. 
On monte dans le ciel par un chemin de pleurs, 
Mais, que leur amertume a de douceurs divines! 
On descend aux enfers par un chemin de fleurs, 
Mais helas! que ces fleurs nous preparent d'epines! 
La fleur qui, dans un jour, seche et s'epanouit, 
Les bulles d'air et d'eau qu'un petit souffle casse, 
Une ombre qui parait et qui s'evanouit 
Nous represented bien comme le monde passe." 

Naturally, in the face of Maupassant's brilliant 
Boule de Suif, Huysmans's sly attack on patriot- 
ism was overlooked. Croquis Parisiens (1880) 
contains specimens of Huysmans's astounding 
virtuosity. No one before has ever described 
sundry aspects of Paris with such verisimilitude — 
that Paris he said was, because of the Americans, 

196 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

fast becoming a " sinister Chicago." Balls, 
cafes, bars, omnibus-conductors, washerwomen, 
chestnut-sellers, hairdressers, remote landscapes 
and corners of the city, cabarets, la Bievre, the 
underground river, with prose paraphrases of 
music, perfumes, flowers — Huysmans aston- 
ishes by his prodigality of epithet and justness of 
observation. What Manet, Pissaro, Raffaelli, 
Forain, were doing with oil and pastel and pencil, 
he accomplished with his pen. A Vau l'Eau 
followed in 1882. It is considered the typical 
Huysmans tale, and some see in Jean Folantin 
its unhappy hero, obsessed by the desire for a 
juicy beefsteak, the prototype of Durtal. Folan- 
tin is a poor employee in the Ministry who must 
exist on his annual salary of fifteen hundred francs. 
He haunts cheap restaurants, lives in cheap lodg- 
ings, is seedy and sour, with the nerves of a volup- 
tuary. His sense of smell makes his life a night- 
mare. The sordid recital would be comical but 
that it is so villainously real. It is an Odyssey 
of a dyspeptic. Dickens would have set us laugh- 
ing over the woes of this Folantin, or Dostoievsky 
would have made us weep — as he did in Poor 
Folk. But Huysmans has no time for tears or 
laughter; he must register his truth, and at the 
end an odor of stale cheese exhales from the 
printed page. Wretched Monsieur Folantin. Of 
the official life so clearly presented in some of 
Maupassant's tales, we get little; Huysmans is 
too much preoccupied with Folantin's stomach 
troubles. In the same volume, though published 

197 



EGOISTS 

first in 1887, is Un Dilemme, which is a pitiful 
tale of a girl abandoned. Huysmans, while he 
came under the influence of L'Education Senti- 
mentale, seems to have taken as a hit motiv the 
idiotic antics of Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet. 
This pair of mediocre maniacs were his models 
for mankind at large. Les Soeurs Vatard (1879), 
praised so warmly by Zola in The Experimental 
Novel, is not a novel, but kaleidoscopic Parisian 
pictures of intimate low life, executed with con- 
summate finish, and closeness to fact. The two 
sisters Vatard, Celine and Desiree, with their love 
affairs, fill a large volume. There are minute 
descriptions of proletarian interiors, sewing-shops 
full of perspiring girls, railroad-yards, loco- 
motives, and a gingerbread fair. The men are 
impudent scamps, bullies, souteneurs, the women 
either weak or vulgar. Veracity there often is 
and an air of reality — though these swaggerers 
and simpletons are silhouettes, not half as vital 
as Zola's Lise or Goncourt's Germinie Lacerteux. 
But atmosphere, toujours atmosphere — of that 
Huysmans is the compeller. Not a disagreeable 
scene, smell, or sound does he spare his readers. 
And how many genre pictures he paints for us in 
this book. 

We reach bourgeois life with En Menage (1881). 
Andre and Cyprien the novelist and painter are 
not so individual as, say, old pere Vatard in the 
preceding story. They but serve as stalking 
horses for Huysmans to show the stupid miseries 
of the married state; that whether a man is or 

198 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

is not married he will regret it. Love is the su- 
preme poison of life. Andre is deceived by his 
wife, Cyprien lives lawlessly. Neither one is con- 
tented. The novel is careful in workmanship; 
it is like Goncourt and Flaubert, both gray and 
masterful. But it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. 
Like the early Christian fathers, Huysmans had a 
conception of Woman, "the eternal feminine of 
the eternal simpleton, " which is hardly ennobling. 
The painter Cyprien is said to be a portrait of 
the author. 

A Rebours appeared at the psychologic mo- 
ment. Decadence was in the air. Either you 
were a decadent or violently opposed to the move- 
ment. Verlaine had consecrated the word — 
hardly an expressive one. The depraved young 
Jean, Duke of Esseintes,greedy of exotic sensations, 
who figures as the hero of this gorgeous prose 
mosaic, is said to be the portrait of a Parisian 
poet, and a fashionable dilettante of art painted 
by Whistler. But there is more of Huysmans — 
the exquisite literary critic that is Huysmans — 
in the work. If, as Henry James remarks: 
" When you have no taste you have no discretion 
— which is the conscience of taste," then Huys- 
mans must be acclaimed a man of unexampled 
tact. His handling of a well-nigh impossible 
theme, his " technical heroism," above all, his 
soul-searching tactics in that wonderful Chapter 
VII, when Des Esseintes, suffering from the 
malady of the infinite, proceeds to examine his 
conscience and portrays for us the most fluctu- 

199 



EGOISTS 

ating shades of belief and feeling — his touch here 
is sure, and casuistically immoral, as " all art is 
immoral for the inartistic.' ' The chief value of 
the book for future generations of critics lies in 
Chapters XII and XIV. Huysmans' s literary 
and artistic preferences are catalogued with 
delicacy and erudition. More Byzantine than By- 
zance, A Rebours is a storehouse of art treasures, 
and it was once the battle-field of the literary 
elite. It is a history of the artistic decadent, the 
man of disdainful inquietudes who searches for 
an earthly artificial paradise. The mouth or- 
chestra which, by- the aid of various liquors, 
gives to the tongue sensations analogous to music; 
the flowers and perfume concerts, the mechanical 
landscape, the mock sea — all these are mysti- 
fications. Huysmans the farceur, the Jules 
Verne of aesthetics, is enjoying himself. His 
liquor symphony he borrowed from La Chimie du 
Gout by Polycarpe Poncelet; from Zola, perhaps, 
his concert of flowers. As for the originality of 
these diversions, we may turn to Goethe and 
find in his Triumph der Empfindsamkeit the 
mechanical landscape of the Prince, who can 
enjoy sunlight or moonlight at will. He has also 
a doll to whom he sighs, rhapsodises, and passes 
in its silent company hours of rapture. Villiers 
de ITsle Adam evidently read Goethe: see his 
Eve of the Future. All of which shows the folly 
of certain critics who recognise in Huysmans the 
prime exemplar of the decadent — that much 
misunderstood word. But how about Goethe? 
200 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

A Rebours, notwithstanding Huysmans's later 
pilgrimage to Canossa, he never excelled. It is 
his most personal achievement. It also contains 
the most beautiful writing of this Paganini of 
prose. 

En Rade (1887) did not attract much attention. 
It is not dull; on the contrary, it is very Huys- 
mansish. But it is not a subject that enthralls. 
Jacques Maries and his wife have lost their money. 
They go into the country to live cheaply. The 
author's detestation of nature was apparently 
the motive for writing the book. There are 
fantastic dreams worthy of H. G. Wells, and 
realistic descriptions of a calf's birth and a cat's 
agony; the last two named prove the one-time 
disciple of Zola had not lost his vision; the truth 
is, Zola's method is melodramatic, romantic, 
vague, when compared to Huysmans's implacable 
manner of etching petty facts. 

But in La-Bas he takes a leap across the ditch 
of naturalism and reaches another, if not more 
delectable, territory. . This was in 189 1. A new 
manifesto must be made — the Goncourts had 
printed a bookful. Symbolism, not naturalism, 
is now the shibboleth. Huysmans declares that: 

It is essential to preserve the veracity of the docu- 
ment, the precision of detail, the fibrous and nervous 
language of Realism, but it is equally essential to be- 
come the well-digger of the soul, and not to attempt 
to explain what is mysterious by mental maladies. 
... It is essential, in a word, to follow the great 
road so deeply dug out by Zola, but it is also neces- 

201 



EGOISTS 

sary to trace a parallel pathway in the air, another 
road by which we may reach the Beyond, to achieve 
thus a Spiritual naturalism. 

And by a curious, a bizarre route Durtal, the ever- 
lasting Durtal, sought to achieve spiritually — 
a spirituality a rebours, for it was by devil-worship 
and the study of Gilles de Rais of ill-fame, that 
he reached his goal. We also study church bells, 
incubi, satanism, demons, witches, sacrileges of 
a raffine sort; indeed, an enormous amount of 
occult lumber is dumped into the book, which is 
indigestible on that account. Diabolic lore a la 
Jules Dubois and other modern magi is profuse. 
That wicked lady, who is far from credible, 
Madame Chantelouve, flits through various 
chapters. Her final disappearance, one hopes 
"below'' — like the devils in the pantomime — 
is received by Durtal and the reader with a sigh of 
relief. She is quite the vilest character in French 
fiction, and, as Stendhal would say, her only ex- 
cuse is that she never existed. The Black Mass 
is painted by an artist adroit in the manipulation 
of the sombre and magnificent. 

La-Bas proved a prophetic weather-vane. 
En Route in 1895 did not astonish those who had 
been studying the spiritual fluctuations of Huys- 
mans. Behold the miracle! He is a believing 
Christian. Wisely the antecedent causes were 
tacitly avoided. "I believe," said Durtal, simply. 
Of superior interest is his struggle up the ladder 
to perfection. This painful feat is slowly ac- 
202 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

complished in La Cathedrale (1898), L'Oblat 
(1903), and Lourdes (1906). And it must be 
confessed that the more pious grew Huysmans 
the less artist he — as might have been expected. 
What is his art to a man who is concerned not 
with the things of this world ? He never lost his 
acerbity, or his faculty for the phrase magical, 
though his sense of proportion gradually vanished. 
Luckily, he is not saccharine like the majority of 
writers on religious topics. Ferdinand Brunetiere 
complained that Flaubert was unbearably erudite 
in his three short stories — echoing what Sainte- 
Beuve had said of Salammbo years before. 
What must he have thought of that astonishing 
Cathedral, with its chapters on the symbolism of 
architecture, sculpture, gems, flowers (Sir Thomas 
Browne and his quincunxes are fairly beaten 
from the field), vestments, sacred vessels of the 
altar, and a multitude of mysterious things, 
hieroglyphics, and dark liturgical riddles ? There 
are ravishing pages, though none so solemn and 
moving as the description of the De projundis and 
Dies tree in En Route. 

It may prove profitable for the student after 
reading La Cathedrale to take up Walter Pater's 
unfinished story, Gaston De Latour, and read 
the description therein of the Chartres Cathedral. 
There are pages of exquisitely felt prose, but 
Huysmans sees more and tells what he sees in less 
musical though more lapidary phrases. 

For anyone except the trailer after strange 
souls The Oblate is an affliction. Madame 

203 



EGOISTS 

Bavoil, with her notre ami, is a chattering nui- 
sance, withal a worthy creature. Durtal is always 
in the dumps. He speaks much of interior peace, 
but he gives the impression of a man sitting pain- 
fully amidst spiritual brambles. Perhaps he felt 
that for him after his Golgotha are the sweet- 
singing flames of Purgatory. We are not sorry 
when he returns to Paris. As for the book on 
Lourdes, it is like an open wound. A whiff from 
the operating-room of a hospital comes to you. 
We are edified by the childlike faith with which 
Huysmans accepts the report of cures that would 
stagger the most perfervid Christian Scientist. 
His Saint-Lydwine is hard reading, written by 
a man whose mysticism was a matter of rigid 
definition, a thing to be weighed and felt and 
verbally proved. Fleming-like, he is less melodist 
than harmonist — and such acrid harmonies, poly- 
phonic variations, and fuguelike flights to the 
other side of good and evil. 

George Moore was the first English critic to 
recognise Huysmans. He wrote that "a page 
of Huysmans is as a dose of opium, a glass of ex- 
quisite and powerful liquor." Frankly, it was 
his conversion that focussed upon Huysmans so 
much attention. No one may remain isolated 
in his century. He has never been a favourite 
with the larger Parisian public; rather, a curi- 
osity, a spiritual ogre turned saint. And the 
saintship has been hotly disputed. Abb6 Mug- 
nier and Dom A. du Bourg, the prior of Sainte- 
Marie, since his death, have written eloquently 
204 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

about his conversion, his life as an oblate, and 
his edifying death. Huysmans refused anaes- 
thetics because he wished to suffer for his life of 
sin, above all suffer for his early writings. Need 
it be added that, like Tolstoy, he repudiated ab- 
solutely his first books? Huysmans In time is 
the title of the recollections of both Dom du 
Bourg and Henry Ceard. His literary executors 
destroyed many manuscripts. He left his money 
principally to charities. 

Huysmans was not a man possessing what are 
so vaguely denominated " general ideas." He 
was never interested in the chess-play of meta- 
physics, politics, or science. He was a specialist, 
one who had ransacked libraries for curious de- 
tails, despoiled perfumers' catalogues for their 
odourous vocables, pored over technical diction- 
aries for odd-coloured words, and studied cook- 
books for savoury terms. His gamut of sensations 
began at the violet ray. He was a perverse aristo- 
crat who descended to the gutter there to analyse 
the various stratifications of filth; when he re- 
turned to his ivory cell, he had discovered, not 
humanity, but an anodyne, the love of God. 
Thenceforth, he was interested in one thing — 
the saving of the soul of Joris-Karl Huysmans, 
and being a marvellous verbal artist, his recital 
of the event startled us, fascinated us. Renan 
once wrote of Amiel: "He speaks of sin, of sal- 
vation, of redemption and conversion, as if these 
things were realities." Let us rather imitate 
Sainte-Beuve, who said: "You may not cease 
205 



EGOISTS 

to be a sceptic after reading Pascal, but you must 
cease to treat believers with contempt." And 
this injunction is not difficult to obey in the case 
of Huysmans, for whom the things derided by 
Renan were the profoundest realities of his 
troubled life. 



206 



VI 

THE EVOLUTION OF AN EGOIST 

MAURICE BARRES 

Once upon a time a youth, slim, dark, and 
delicate, lived in a tower. This tower was com- 
posed of ivory — the youth sat within its walls, 
tapestried by most subtle art, and studied his soul. 
As in a mirror, a fantastic mirror of opal and gold, 
he searched his soul and noted its faintest music, 
its strangest modulations, its transmutation of 
joy into melancholy; he saw its grace and its 
corruption. These matters he registered in his 
" little mirrors of sincerity.' ' And he was happy 
in an ivory tower and far away from the world, 
with its rumours of dulness, feeble - crimes, and 
flat triumphs. After some years the young man 
wearied of the mirror, with his spotted soul cruelly 
pictured therein; wearied of the tower of ivory 
and its alien solitudes; so he opened its carved 
doors and went into the woods, where he found a 
deep pool of water. It was very small, very clear, 
and reflected his face, reflected on its quivering 
surface his unstable soul. But soon other images 
of the world appeared above the pool: men's 
faces and women's, and the shapes of earth and 

207 



EGOISTS 

sky. Then Narcissus, who was young, whose 
soul was sensitive, forgot the ivory tower and the 
magic pool, and merged his own soul into the 
soul of his people. 

Maurice Barres is the name of the youth, and 
he is now a member of the Academie Franf aise. 
His evolution from the Ivory tower of Egoism 
to the broad meadows of life is not an insoluble 
enigma; his books and his active career offer many 
revelations of a fascinating, though often baffling, 
personality. His passionate curiosity in all that 
concerns the moral nature of his fellow man 
lends to his work its own touch of universality; 
otherwise it would not be untrue to say that the 
one Barres passion is love of his native land. 
"Fr&nce" is engraved on his heart; France and 
not the name of a woman. This may be re- 
garded as a grave shortcoming by the sex. 



Paul Bourget has said of him: " Among the 
young people who have entered literature since 
1880 Maurice Barres is certainly the most cele- 
brated. . • . One must see other than a decadent 
or a dilettante in this analyst . . . the most 
original who has appeared since Baudelaire." 
Bourget said much more about the young writer, 
then in his twenties, who in 1887 startled Paris 
with a curious, morbid, ironical, witty book, a 
production neither fiction nor fact. This book 
was called Sous PCEil des Barbares. It made a 

208 



MAURICE BARRES 

sensation. He was born on the 22nd of September, 
1862, at Charmes-sur-Moselle (Vosges), and re- 
ceived a classical education at the Nancy (old 
capital of Lorraine) Lyceum. Of good family 
— among his ancestors he could boast some mili- 
tary men — he early absorbed a love for his native 
province, a love that later was to become a spe- 
cies of soil-worship. His health not strong at 
any time, and nervous of temperament, he never- 
theless moved on Paris, for the inevitable siege of 
which all romantic readers of Balzac dream dur- 
ing their school-days. " A nous deux!" muttered 
Rastignac, shaking his fist at the city spread be- 
low him. A nous deux! exclaim countless young- 
sters ever since. Maurice, however, was not 
that sort of Romantic. He meant to conquer 
Paris, but in a unique way; he detested melo- 
drama. He removed to the capital in 1882. His 
first literary efforts had appeared in the Journal 
de la Meurthe et des Vosges; he could see as a 
boy the Vosges Mountains; and Alsace, not far 
away, was in the clutches of the hated enemy. In 
Paris he wrote for several minor reviews, met dis- 
tinguished men like Leconte de Lisle, Roden- 
bach, Valade, Rollinat; and his Parisian debut 
was in La Jeune France, with a short story en- 
titled Le Chemin de l'lnstitut (April, 1882). 
Ernest Gaubert,,who has given us these details, 
says that, despite Leconte de Lisle's hearty sup- 
port, Mme. Adam refused an essay of Barres as 
unworthy of the Nouvelle Revue. In 1884 ap- 
peared a mad little review, Les T aches d'Encre, ir- 

209 



EGOISTS 

regular in publication. Despite its literary qual- 
ity, the young editor displayed some knowledge 
of the tactics of "new" journalism. When Morin 
was assassinated by Mme. Clovis Hugues, sand- 
wich men paraded the boulevards carrying on 
their boards this inscription: " Morin reads no 
longer Les T aches d'Encre!" Perseverance such 
as this should have been rewarded; but little 
Ink-spots quickly disappeared. Barres founded 
a new review in 1886, Les Chroniques, in com- 
pany with some brilliant men. Jules Claretie 
about this time remarked, "Make a note of the 
name of Maurice Barres. I prophesy that it will 
become famous." Barres had discovered that 
Rastignac's pugnacious methods were obsolete in 
the battle with Paris, though there was no folly he 
would be incapable of committing if he only could 
attract attention — even to walking the boule- 
vards in the guise of primeval man. Far removed 
as his exquisite art now is from this blustering 
desire for publicity, this threat, uttered in jest or 
not, is significant. Maurice Barres has since 
stripped his soul bare for the world's ire or edi- 
fication. 

Wonder-children do not always pursue their 
natural vocation. Pascal was miraculously en- 
dowed as a mathematician; he ended a master 
of French prose, a hallucinated, wretched man. 
Franz Liszt was a prodigy, but aspired to the 
glory of Beethoven. Raphael was a painting 
prodigy, and luckily died so young that he had not 
•time to change his profession. Swinburne wrote 

210 



MAURICE BARRES 

faultless verse as a youth. He is a prosateur to- 
day. Maurice Barres was born a metaphysician; 
he has the metaphysical faculty as some men 
a fiddle hand. He might say with Prosper 
Merimee, "Metaphysic pleases me because it 
is never-ending." But not as Kant, Condillac, 
or William James — to name men of widely dis- 
parate systems — did the precocious thinker plan 
objectively. The proper study of Maurice Barres 
was Maurice Barres, and he vivisected his Ego 
as calmly as a surgeon trepanning a living skull. 
He boldly proclaimed the cuke du moi, proclaimed 
his disdain for the barbarians who impinged 
upon his /. To study and note the fleeting shapes 
of his soul — in his case a protean psyche — was 
the one thing worth doing in a life of mediocrity. 
And this new variation of the eternal hatred for 
the bourgeois contained no menaces levelled at 
any class, no groans of disgust a la Huysmans. 
Imperturbable, with an icy indifference, Barres 
pursued his fastidious way. What we hate we 
fight, what we despise we avoid./ Barres merely 
despised the other Egos around him, and entering 
his ivory tower he bolted the door; but on reach- 
ing the roof did not fail to sound his horn an- 
nouncing to an eager world that the miracle had 
come to pass — Maurice Barres was discovered 
by Maurice Barres. 

Egoism as a religion is hardly a new thing. 

It began with the first sentient male human. It 

has since preserved the species, discovered the 

" infer iority" of women, made civilisation, and 

211 



EGOISTS 

founded the fine arts. Any attempt to displace 
the Ego in the social system has only resulted in 
inverting the social pyramid. (Love our neighbour 
as ourself is trouble-breeding;] but we must first 
love ourself as a precaution That our neighbour 
will not suffer both in body and in mind. The 
interrogation posed on the horizon of our con- 
sciousness, regarding the perfectibility of man- 
kind, is best answered by a definition of socialism 
as that religion which proves all men to be equally 
stupid. Do not let us confound the ideas of 
progress and perfectibility. Since man first real- 
ised himself as man, first said, I am I, there has 
been no progress. No art has progressed. 
Science is a perpetual rediscovery. And what 
modern thinker has taught anything new ? 

Life is a circle. We are imprisoned, in the 
cage of our personality. Each human creates his 
own picture of the world, re-creates it each day. 
These are the commonplaces of metaphysics; 
Schopenhauer has presented some of them to us 
in tempting garb. 

Compare the definitions of Man made by 
Pascal and Cabanis. Man, said Pascal, is but 
a reed, the feeblest of created things; yet a reed 
which thinks. Man, declared the materialistic 
Cabanis, is a digestive tube — a statement that 
provoked the melodious indignation of Lacor- 
daire. What am I ? asks Barres; je suis un instant 
d'une chose immortelle. And this instant of an 
immortal thing has buried within it something 
eternal of which the individual has only the usu- 
212 



MAURICE BARRES 

fruct. (Goncourt wrote, "What is life? The 
usufruct of an aggregation of molecules.") Be- 
fore him Senancour in Obermann — the reveries 
of a sick, hermetic soul — studied his malady, 
but offered no prophylactic. Amiel was so 
lymphatic of will that he doubted his own doubts, 
doubted all but his dreams. He, too, had fed at 
HegePs ideologic banquet, where the verbal viands 
snared the souls of guests. But Barres was 
too sprightly a spirit to remain a mystagogue. 
Diverse and contradictory as are his several souls, 
he did not utterly succumb to the spirit of analysis. 
Whether he was poison-proof or not to the venom 
that slew the peace of the unhappy Amiel (that 
bonze of mysticism), the young Lorrainer never 
lacked elasticity or spontaneity, never ceased to 
react after his protracted plunges into the dark 
pools of his subliminal self. And his volitional 
powers were not paralysed. Possessing a sensi- 
bility as delicate and vibrating as Benjamin Con- 
stant, he has had the courage to study its fevers, 
its disorders, its subtleties. He knew that there 
were many young men like him, not only in 
France, but throughout the world, highly organ- 
ised, with less bone and sinew than nerves — 
exposed nerves; egoistic souls, weak of will. 
We are sick, this generation of young men, ex- 
claimed Barres; sick from the lying assurances 
of science, sick from the false promises of poli- 
ticians. There must be a remedy. One among 
us must immolate himself, study the malady, seek 
its cure. I, Maurice Barres, shall be the mirror 
213 



EGOISTS 

reflecting the fleeting changes of my environment, 
social and psychical. I repudiate the transcen- 
dental indifference of Renan; I will weigh my 
sensations as in a scale; I shall not fear to proclaim 
the result. Amiel, a Protestant Hamlet (as Bour- 
get so finely says), believes that every landscape 
is a state of soul. My soul is full of landscapes. 
Therein all may enter and find their true selves. 

All this, and much more, Barres sang in his 
fluid, swift, and supple prose, without a vestige 
of the dogmatic. He did not write either to 
prove or to convince, only to describe his interior 
life. He did not believe, neither did he despair. 
There is a spiritual malice in his egoism that re- 
moves it far from the windy cosmos of Walt 
Whitman or the vitriolic vanity of D'Annunzio. 
In his fugue-like flights down the corridor of his 
metaphysics, he never neglects to drop some 
poetic rose, some precious pearl of sentiment. 
His little book, true spiritual memoirs, aroused 
both wrath and laughter. The wits set to work. 
He was called a dandy of psychology, nicknamed 
Mile. Renan, pronounced a psychical harlequin, 
a masquerader of the emotions; he was told that, 
like Chateaubriand, he wore his heart in a sling. 
Anatole France, while recognising the eloquent 
art of this young man, spoke of the "perverse 
idealist " which is Maurice Barres. His philoso- 
phy was pronounced a perverted pyrrhonism, 
the quintessence of self-worship. A Vita Nuova 
of egoism had been born. 

But the dandy did not falter. He has said that 
214 



MAURICE BARRES 

one never conquers the intellectual suffrages of 
those who precede us in life; he made his appeal 
to young France. And what was the balm in 
Gilead offered by this new doctor of metaphysics ? 
None but a Frenchman at the end of the last cen- 
tury could have conceived the Barresian plan of 
soul-saving. In Baudelaire, Barbey d'Aurevilly, 
and Villiers de ITsle Adam, the union of Roman 
Catholic mysticism and blasphemy has proved to 
many a stumbling-stone. These poets were be- 
lievers, yet Manicheans; they worshipped at 
two shrines; evil was their greater good. Barres 
plucked several leaves from their breviaries. 
He proposed to school his soul by a rigid adherence 
to the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola. 
With the mechanism of this Catholic moralist he 
would train his Ego, cure it of its spiritual dry- 
ness — that malady so feared by St. Theresa — 
and arouse it from its apathy. He would deliver 
us from a Renan-ridden school. 

This scholastic fervour urged Barres to rein- 
state man in the centre of the universe, a position 
from which he had been routed by science. It 
was a pious, mediaeval idea. He did not, how- 
ever, assert the bankruptcy of science, but the 
bankruptcy of pessimism. His book is meta- 
physical autobiography, a Gallic transposition of 
Goethe's Wahrheit und Dichtung. We may now 
see that his concentrated egoism had definite 
aims and was not the conceit of a callow Romantic. 

Barres imbibed from the Parnassian poetic 
group his artistic remoteness. His ivory tower 

215 



EGOISTS 

is a borrowed phrase made by Sainte-Beuve about 
De Vigny. But his mercurial soul could not be 
imprisoned long by frigid theories of impeccable 
art — of art for art's sake. My soul! that alone 
is worth studying, cried Maurice. John Henry 
Newman said the same in a different and more 
modest dialectic. The voice of the French 
youth is shriller, it is sometimes in falsetto; yet 
there is no denying its fundamental sincerity of 
pitch. And he has the trick of light verbal fence 
beloved of his race. He is the comedian among 
moralists. His is neither the frozen eclecticism 
of Victor Cousin, nor the rigid determinism of 
Taine. Yet he is a partial descendant of the 
Renan he flouts, and of Taine — above all, of 
Stendhal and Voltaire. In his early days if one 
had christened him Mile. Stendhal, there would 
have been less to retract. Plus a delicious style, 
he is a masked, slightly feminine variation of the 
great mystifier who wrote La Chartreuse de 
Parme, leaving out the Chartreuse. At times the 
preoccupation of Barres with the moral law ap- 
proaches the borderland of the abnormal. Like 
Jules Laforgue, his intelligence and his sensibility 
are closely wedded. He is a sentimental ironist 
with a taste for self-mockery, a Heine-like humour. 
He had a sense of humour, even when he wore 
the panache of General Boulanger, and opposed 
the Dreyfus proceedings. It may rescue from the 
critical executioner who follows in the footsteps 
of all thinkers, many of his pages. 

A dilettante, an amateur — yes! But so was 
216 



MAURICE BARRES 

Goethe in his Olympus, so Stendhal in his Cos- 
mopolis. He elected at first to view the spectacle 
of life, to study it from afar, and by the tempo of 
his own sensibility. Not the tonic egoism of 
Thoreau this; it has served its turn nevertheless 
in France. Afferent, centripetal, and other for- 
bidding terms, have been bestowed upon his sys- 
tem; while for the majority this word egoism 
has a meaning that implies our most selfish in- 
stincts. If, however, interposes Bourget, you 
consider the word as a formula, then the angle 
of view is altered; if Barres had said in one jet, 
" Nothing is more precious for a man than to 
guard intact his convictions, his passions, his ideal, 
his individuality," those who misjudged this 
courageous apostle of egoism, this fervent prober 
of the human soul, might have modified their 
opinions — and would probably have passed him 
by. It was the enigmatic message, the strained 
symbolism, of which Barres delivered himself, 
that puzzled both critics and public. Robert 
Schumann once propounded a question con- 
cerning the Chopin Scherzo: "How is gravity to 
clothe itself if jest goes about in dark veils ?" 
Now Barres, who is far from being a spiritual 
blagueur, suggests this puzzle of Schumann. His 
employment, without a nuance of mockery, of 
the devotional machinery so marvellously devised 
by that captain of souls, Ignatius Loyola, was 
rather disquieting, notwithstanding its very prac- 
tical application to the daily needs of the spirit. 
Ernest Hello, transported by such a spectacle, 

217 



EGOISTS 

may not have been far astray when he wrote of 
the nineteenth century as " having desire without 
light, curiosity without wisdom, seeking God by 
strange ways, ways traced by the hands of men; 
offering rash incense upon the high places to an 
unknown God, who is the God of darkness." 
Ernest Renan was evidently aimed at, but the 
bolt easily wings that metaphysical bird of gay 
plumage, Maurice Barres. 

II 

He has published over a dozen volumes and 
numerous brochures, political and "psycho- 
therapic," many addresses, and one comedy, 
Une Journee Parlementaire. He calls his books 
metaphysical fiction, the adventures of a con- 
templative young man's mind. Paul Bourget 
is the psychologist pure and complex; Barres 
has — rather, had — such a contempt for action 
on the "earthly plane," that at the head of each 
chapter of his "idealogies" he prefixed a resume, 
a concordance of the events that were supposed 
to take place, leaving us free to savour the prose, 
enjoy the fine-spun formal texture, and marvel 
at the contrapuntal involutions of the hero's 
intellect. Naturally a reader, hungry for facts, 
must perish of famine in this rarefied aesthetic 
desert, the background of which is occasionally 
diversified by a sensuality that may be dainty, 
yet is disturbing because of its disinterested por- 
trayment. The Eternal Feminine is not unsung 

218 



MAURICE BARRES 

in the Barres novels. Woman for his imagina- 
tion is a creature exquisitely fashioned, hardly an 
odalisque, nor yet the symbol of depravity we 
encounter in Huysmans. She is a " phantom of 
delight"; but that she has a soul we beg to doubt. 
Barres almost endowed her with one in the case 
of his Berenice; and Berenice died very young. 
A young man, with various names, traverses these 
pages. Like the Durtal, or Des Esseintes, or 
Folantin, of Huysmans, who is always Huys- 
mans, the hero of Barres is always Barres. In 
the first of the trilogy — of which A Free Man 
and The Garden of Berenice are the other two 
— we find Philippe escaping through seclusion 
and revery the barbarians, his adversaries. The 
Adversary — portentous title for the stranger 
who grazes our sensitive epidermis — is the 
being who impedes or misleads a spirit in search 
of itself. If he deflects us from our destiny, he 
is the enemy. It may be well to recall at this 
juncture Stendhal, who avowed that our first ene- 
mies are our parents, an idea many an insurgent 
boy has asserted when his father was not present. 
Seek peace and happiness with the conviction 
that they are never to be found; felicity must be 
in the experiment, not in the result. Be ardent 
and sceptical. Here Philippe touches hands 
with the lulling Cyrenaicism of Walter Pater. 
And Barres might have sat for one of Pater's 
imaginary portraits. But it is too pretty to last, 
such a dream as this, in a world wherein work 
and sorrow rule. He is not an ascetic, Philippe. 
219 



EGOISTS 

He eats rare beefsteaks, smokes black Havanas, 
clothes himself in easy-fitting garments, and 
analyses with cordial sincerity his multicoloured 
soul. (And oh! the colours of it; oh! its fluctu- 
ating forms!) The young person invades his 
privacy — a solitary in Paris is an incredible 
concept. Together they make journeys " con- 
ducted by the sun." She is dreamlike until we 
read, "Cependant elle le suivait de lorn, delicate 
et de hanches merveilleuses " — which delicious 
and dislocated phrase is admired by lovers of 
Goncourt syntax, but must be shocking to the old- 
fashioned who prefer the classic line and balance 
of Bossuet. 

Nothing happens. Everything happens. Philippe 
makes the stations of the cross of earthly disil- 
lusionment. He weighs love, he weighs literature 
— "all these books are but pigeon-holes in which 
I classify my ideas concerning myself, their titles 
serve only as the labels of the different portions 
of my appetite." Irony is his ivory tower, his 
refuge from the banalities of his contemporaries. 
Henceforth he will enjoy his Ego. It sounds at 
moments like Bunthorne transposed to a more 
intense tonality. 

But even beefsteaks, cigars, wine, and phil- 
osophy pall. He craves a mind that will echo his, 
craves a mental duo, in which the clash of char- 
acter and opposition of temperaments will evoke 
pleasing cerebral music. In this dissatisfaction 
with his solitude we may detect the first rift in 
the lute of his egoism. , He finds an old friend, 

220 



MAURICE BARRES 

Simon by name, and after some preliminary senti- 
mental philandering at the seashore, in the com- 
pany of two young ladies, the pair agree to lead 
a monastic life. To Lorraine they retire and draft 
a code of diurnal obligations. "We are never so 
happy as when in exaltation," and "The pleasure 
of exaltation is greatly enhanced by the analysis 
of it." Their souls are fortified and engineered 
by the stern practices of Loyola. The woman 
idea occasionally penetrates to their cells. It 
distracts them — "woman, who has always pos- 
sessed the annoying art of making imbeciles 
loquacious." Notwithstanding these wraiths of 
feminine fancy, Philippe finds himself almost 
cheerful. His despondent moods have vanished. 
He quarrels, of course, with Simon, who is dry, an 
esprit fort. 

The Intercessors now appear, the intellectual 
saints who act as intermediaries between im- 
pressionable, bruised natures and the Infinite. 
They are the near neighbours of God, for they are 
the men who have experienced an unusual num- 
ber of sensations. Philippe admits that his tem- 
perament oscillates between languor and ecstasy. 
Benjamin Constant and Sainte-Beuve are the 
two "Saints" of Sensibility who aid the youths 
in their self -analysis; rather a startling devolu- 
tion from the Imitation of Christ and Ignatius 
Loyola. Tiring, finally, of this sterile analysis, 
and discovering that the neurasthenic Simon is 
not a companion-soul, Philippe, very illogically 
yet very naturally, resolves that he must bathe 

221 



EGOISTS 

himself in new sensations, and proceeds to Venice. 
We accompany him willingly, for this poet who 
handles prose as Chopin the pianoforte, tells us of 
his soul in Venice, and we are soothed when he 
speaks of the art of John Bellini, of Titian, Vero- 
nese, above all of Tiepolo, "who was too much a 
sceptic to be bitter. . . . His conceptions have 
that lassitude which follows pleasure, a lassitude 
preferred by epicureans to pleasure itself." Grace- 
ful, melancholy Tiepolo. This Venetian episode 
is rare reading. 

The last of the trilogy is The Garden of 
Berenice. It is the best of the three in human 
interest, and its melancholy-sweet landscapes 
exhale a charm that is nearly new in French lit- 
erature; something analogous may be found in 
Slavic music, or in the Intimiste school of painting. 
Several of these landscapes are redolent of Wat- 
teau: tender, doleful, sensuous, their twilights 
filled with vague figures, languidly joying in the 
mood of the moment. The impressionism which 
permeates this book is a veritable lustration for 
those weary of commonplace modern fiction. 
Not since has Barres excelled this idyl of the little 
Berenice and her slowly awakening consciousness 
to beauty, aroused by an old, half-forgotten 
museum in meridional France. At Aries, en- 
compassed by the memory of a dead man, she 
loves her donkey, her symbolic ducks, and Phil- 
ippe, who divines her adolescent sorrow, her yearn- 
ing spirit, her unfulfilled dreams. Her garden 
upon the immemorial and paludian plains of 

222 



MAURICE BARRES 

Aries is threaded by silver waters, illuminated 
by copper sunsets, their tones reverberating from 
her robes. Something of Maeterlinck's stam- 
mering, girlish, questioning Melisande is in 
Berenice. Maeterlinckian, too, is the statement 
that "For an accomplished spirit there is but 
one dialogue — that between our two Egos, 
the momentary Ego we are, and the ideal Ego 
toward which we strive." Berenice would marry 
Philippe. We hold our breath, hoping that his 
tyrant Ego may relax, and that, off guard, he 
may snatch with fearful joy the chance to gain 
this childlike creature. Alas! there is a certain 
M. Martin, who is Philippe's political adversary 
— Philippe is a candidate for the legislature; he 
is become practical; in the heat of his philosophic 
egoism he finds that if a generous negation is 
good waiting ground, wealth and the participa- 
tion in political affairs is a better one. M. 
Martin covets the hand of Berenice. He repels 
her because he is an engineer, a man of positive, 
practical spirit, who would drain the marshes 
in Berenice's garden of their beautiful miasmas, 
and build healthy houses for happy people. To 
Philippe he is the "adversary" who despises the 
contemplative life. "He had a habit of saying, 
'Do you take me for a dreamer?' as one should 
say, 'Do you take me for an idiot?'" Philippe, 
nevertheless, more solicitous of his Ego than of 
his affections, advises Berenice to marry M. 
Martin. This she does, and dies like a flower 
in a cellar. She is a lovely memory for our young 
223 



EGOISTS 

idealist, who in voluptuous accents rhapsodises 
about her as did Sterne over his dead donkey. 
Sensibility, all this, to the very ultima Thule of 
egoism. Then, Philippe obtains the concession 
of a suburban hippodrome. Poor Berenice! 
Pauvre Petite — Secousse ! The name of this 
book was to have been Qualis artijex pereo! 
And there is a fitting Neronic tang to its cruel 
and sentimental episodes that would have justi- 
fied the title. But for Barres, it has a Goethian 
quality; "all is true, nothing exact." 

In 1892 was published The Enemy of Law, a 
book of violent anarchical impulse and lyric dis- 
order. It is still Philippe, though under another 
name, Andre, who approves of a bomb launched 
by the hand of an anarchist, and because of the 
printed expression of his sympathy he is sent to 
prison for a few months. A Free Man, he en- 
dures his punishment philosophically, winning 
the friendship of a young Frenchwoman, an 
exaltee, and also of a little Russian princess, a 
silhouette of Marie Bashkir tseff, and an unmis- 
takable blood-relative of Stendhal's Lamiel. 
After his liberation Andre makes sentimental pil- 
grimages with one or the other, finally with both 
of his friends, to Germany and elsewhere. A 
shaggy dog, Velu, figures largely in these pages, 
and we are treated to some disquisitions on canine 
psychology. Nor are the sketches of Saint-Simon, 
Fourier, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, and 
Ludwig of Bavaria, the Wagnerian idealist, par- 
ticularly novel. They but reveal the nascent 

224 



MAURICE BARRES 

social sympathies of B aires, who was at the law- 
despising period of his development. His little 
princess has a touch of Berenice, coupled with 
a Calmuck disregard of the convenances; she loves 
the "warm smell of stables" and does not fear 
worldly criticism of her conduct; the trio van- 
ish in a too Gallic, too rose-coloured perspective. 
A volume of protest, The Enemy of Law served 
its turn, though here the phrase — clear, alert, 
suave — of his earlier books is transformed to a 
style charged with flame and acid. The moral 
appears to be dangerous, as well as diverting — 
develop your instincts to the uttermost, give satis- 
faction to your sensibility; then must you attain 
the perfection of your Ego, and therefore will 
not attenuate the purity of your race. The 
Russian princess, we are assured, carried with 
her the ideas of antique morality. 

In the second trilogy — Du Sang, de la 
Volupt£, et de la Mort; Amori et Dolori Sacrum; 
and Les Amities Franf aises — we begin an 
itinerary which embraces parts of Italy, Spain, 
Germany, France, particularly Lorraine. Barres 
must be ranked among those travellers of acute 
vision and aesthetic culture who in their wander- 
ings disengage the soul of a city, of a country. 
France, from Count de Caylus and the Ahb6 
Barthelemy (Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis) to 
Stendhal, Taine, and Bourget, has given birth 
to many distinguished examples. The first of 
the new group, Blood, Pleasure, and Death — 
a sensational title for a work so rich and consoling 

225 



EGOISTS 

in substance — is a collection of essays and tales. 
The same young man describes his aesthetic and 
moral impressions before the masterpieces of 
Angelo and Vinci, or the tombs, cathedrals, and 
palaces of Italy and Spain. Cordova is visited, 
the gardens of Lombardy, Ravenna, Parma — 
Stendhal's beloved city — Siena, Pisa; there are 
love episodes in diaphanous keys. Barres, ever 
magnanimous in his critical judgments, pays 
tribute to the memory of his dead friends, Jules 
Tellier and Marie Bashkirtseff. He understood 
her soul, though afterward cooled when he dis- 
covered the reality of the Bashkirtseff legend. 
(He speaks of the house in which she died as 6 Rue 
de Prony; Marie died at 30 Rue Ampere.) In 
the succeeding volume, consecrated to love and 
sorrow, the soul of Venice, the soul of a dead 
city, is woven with souvenirs of Goethe, Byron, 
Chateaubriand, Musset, George Sand, Taine, 
Leopold Robert the painter-suicide, Theophile 
Gautier, and Richard Wagner. The magic of 
these prose-dreams is not that of an artist merely 
revelling in description; Pierre Loti, for instance, 
writes with no philosophy but that of the disen- 
chanted; he is a more luscious Senancour; 
D'Annunzio has made of Venice a golden monu- 
ment to his gigantic pride as poet. Not so 
Barres. The image of death and decay, the rec- 
ollections of the imperial and mighty past aroused 
by his pen are as so many chords in his egoistic 
philosophy : Venice guarded its Ego from the 
barbarians; from the dead we learn the secret of 
226 



MAURICE BARRES 

life. The note of revolt which sounded so drastic- 
ally in The Enemy of Law is absent here; in that 
story Barres, mindful of Auguste Comte and 
Ibsen, asserted that the dead poisoned the living. 
The motive of reverence for the soil, for the past, 
the motive of traditionalism, is beginning to be 
overheard. In French Friendships, he takes 
his little son Philippe to Joan of Arc's country 
and enforces the lesson of patriotism. In his 
Le Voyage de Sparte, the same spirit is present. 
He is the man from Lorraine at Corinth, Eleusis, 
or Athens, humble and solicitous for the soul of 
his race, eager to extract a moral benefit from 
the past. He studies the Antigone of Sophocles, 
the Helen of Goethe. He also praises his master, 
the classical scholar, Louis Menard. Barres has, 
in a period when France seems bent on burning 
its historical ships, destroying precious relics of 
its past, blown the trumpet of alarm; not the 
destructive blast of Nietzsche, but one that calls 
" Spare our dead!" Little wonder Bourget pro- 
nounced him the most efficacious servitor, at the 
present hour, of France the eternal. Force and 
spiritual fecundity Barres demands of himself; 
force and spiritual fecundity he demands from 
France. And, like the vague insistent thrum- 
ming of the tympani, a ground bass in some 
symphonic poem, the idea of nationalism is 
gradually disclosed as we decipher these palimp- 
sests of egoism. 



227 



EGOISTS 



III 



The art of B aires till this juncture had been of 
a smoky enchantment, many-hued, of shifting 
shapes, often tenuous, sometimes opaque, yet 
ever graceful, ever fascinating. Whether he was 
a great spiritual force or only an amazing pro- 
tean acrobat, coquetting with the Zeitgeist, his 
admirers and enemies had not agreed upon. 
He had further clouded public opinion by be- 
coming a Boulangist deputy from Nancy, and his 
apparition in the Chamber must have been as 
bizarre as would have been Shelley's in Parlia- 
ment. Barres but followed the illustrious lead 
of Hugo, Lamartine, Lamennais. His friends 
were moved to astonishment. The hater of the 
law, the defender in the press of Chambige, the 
Algerian homicide, this writer of " precious" lit- 
erature, among the political opportunists! Yet 
he sat as a deputy from 1889 to 1893, and proved 
himself a resourceful debater; in the chemistry 
of his personality patriotism had been at last pre- 
cipitated. 

His second trilogy of books was his most ar- 
tistic gift to French literature. But with the 
advent, in 1897, of Les Deracines (The Uprooted) 
a sharp change in style may be noted. It is the 
sociological novel in all its thorny efflorescence. 
Diction is no longer in the foreground. Van- 
ished the velvety rhetoric, the musical phrase, 
the nervous prose of many facets. Sharp in 
contour and siccant, every paragraph is packed 

228 



MAURICE BARRES 

with ideas. The Uprooted is formidable read- 
ing, but we at least touch the rough edges of re- 
ality. Men and women show familiar gestures; 
the prizes run for are human; we are in a dense 
atmosphere of intrigue, political and personal; 
Flaubert's Frederic Moreau, the young man of 
confused ideas and feeble volition, once more 
appears as a cork in the whirlpool of modern 
Paris. The iconoclast that is in the heart of 
this poet is rampant. He smashes institutions, 
though his criticism is often constructive. He 
strives to expand the national soul, strives to com- 
bat cynicism, and he urges decentralisation as 
the sole remedy for the canker that he believes 
is blighting France. Bourget holds that " So- 
ciety is the functioning of a federation of organ- 
isms of which the individual is the cell"; that 
functioning, says Barres, is ill served by the 
violent uprooting of the human organism from 
its earth. A man best develops in his native 
province. His deracination begins with the 
education that sends him to Paris, there to lose 
his originality. The individual can flourish only 
in the land where the mysterious forces of heredity 
operate, make richer his Ego, and create solid- 
arity — that necromantic word which, in the 
hands of social preachers, has become a glit- 
tering and illuding talisman. A tree does not 
grow upward unless its roots plunge deeply into 
the soil. A wise administrator attaches the ani- 
mal to the pasture that suits it. (But Barres 
himself still lives in Paris.) 

229 



EGOISTS 

This nationalism of Barres is not to be con- 
founded with the perfidious slogan of the poli- 
ticians; it is a national symbol for many youth 
of his land. Nor is Barres affiliated with some 
extreme modes of socialism — socialism, that day- 
dream of a retired green-grocer who sports a culti- 
vated taste for dominoes and penny philanthropy. 
To those who demand progress, he asks, Progress- 
ing toward what? Rather let us face the setting 
sun. Do not repudiate the past. Hold to our 
dead. They realise for us the continuity of 
which we are the ephemeral expression. The 
cult of the "I" is truly the cult of the dead. 
Egoism must not be construed as the average 
selfishness of humanity; the higher egoism is the 
art — Barres artist, always — of canalising one's 
Ego for the happiness of others. Out of the 
Barres nationalism has grown a mortuary phil- 
osophy; we see him rather too fond of culling the 
flowers in the cemetery as he takes his evening 
stroll. When a young man he was obsessed by 
the vision of death. His logic is sometimes auda- 
ciously romantic; he paints ideas in a dangerously 
seductive style; and he is sometimes carried away 
by the electric energy which agitates his not too 
robust physique. This cult of the dead, while not 
morbid, smacks nevertheless of the Chinese. 
Our past need not be in a graveyard, and one 
agrees with Jean Dolent that man is surely matter, 
but that his soul is his own work. 

Latterly the patriotism of Barres is beginning 
to assume an unpleasant tinge. In his azure, 

230 



MAURICE BARRES 

chauvinisme is the ugliest cloud. He loves the 
fatal word " revenge." In the Service of Germany 
presents a pitiable picture of a young Alsatian 
forced to military service in the German army. 
It is not pleasing, and the rage of Barres will 
be voted laudable until we recall the stories by 
Frenchmen of the horrors of French military life. 
He upholds France for the French. It is a noble 
idea, but it leads to narrowness and fanatical out- 
breaks. His influence was great from 1888 to 
1893 among the young men. It abated, to be 
renewed in 1896 and 1897. It reached its apogee 
a few years ago. The Rousseau-like cry, "Back 
to the soil!" made of Barres an idol in several 
camps. His election to the Academy, filling the 
vacancy caused by the death of the poet De 
Heredia, was the consecrating seal of a genius 
who has the gift of projecting his sympathies in 
many different directions, only to retrieve as by 
miraculous tentacles the richest moral and 
aesthetic nourishment. We should not forget to 
add, that by the numerous early Barresians, the 
Academician is now looked upon as a backslider 
from the cause of philosophic anarchy. 

The determinisnl of Taine stems in Germany 
and his theory of environment has been effectively 
utilised by Barres. In The Uprooted, the argu- 
ment is driven home by the story of seven young 
Lorrainers who descend upon Paris to capture it. 
Their Professor Bouteiller (said to be a portrait 
of Barres's old master Burdeau at Nancy) has 
educated them as if "they might some day be 

231 



EGOISTS 

called upon to do without a mother-country." 
Paris is a vast maw which swallows them. They 
are disorganised by transplantation. (What young 
American would be, we wonder?) Some drift 
into anarchy, one to the scaffold because of a 
murder; all are arrivistes; and the centre figure, 
Sturel, is a failure because he cannot reconcile 
himself to new, harsh conditions. They blame 
their professor. He diverted the sap of their 
nationalism into strange channels. A few " ar- 
rive," though not in every instance by laudable 
methods. One is a scholar. The account of 
his interview with Taine and Taine's conversa- 
tion with him is another evidence of the intellectual 
mimicry latent in Barres. He had astonished us 
earlier by his recrudescence of Renan's very 
fashion of speech and ideas; literally a feat of 
literary prestidigitation. There are love, po- 
litical intrigue, and a dramatic assassination — 
the general conception of which recalls to us the 
fact that Barres once sat at the knees of Bourget, 
and had read that master's novel, Le Disciple. 
A striking episode is that of the meeting of the 
seven friends at the tomb of Napoleon, there to 
meditate upon his grandeur and to pledge them- 
selves to follow his illustrious example. " Pro- 
fessor of Energy" he is denominated. A Professor 
of Spiritual Energy is certainly Maurice Barres. 
In another scene Taine demonstrates the theory 
of nationalism by the parable of a certain plane 
tree in the Square of the Invalides. For the 
average lover of French fiction The Uprooted 
232 



MAURICE BARRES 

must prove trying. It is, with its two com- 
panions in this trilogy of The Novel of National 
Energy, a social document, rather than a ro- 
mance. It embodies so clearly a whole cross-sec- 
tion of earnest French youths' moral life, that — 
with L'Appel au Soldat, and Leurs Figures, its 
sequels — it may be consulted in the future for a 
veridic account of the decade it describes. One 
seems to lean from a window and watch the agi- 
tation of the populace which swarmed about 
General Boulanger; or to peep through keyholes 
and see the end of that unfortunate victim of 
treachery and an ill-disciplined temperament. 
Barres later reviles the friends of Boulanger who 
deserted him, by his delineation of the Panama 
scandal. Yet it is all as dry as a parliamentary 
blue-book. After finishing these three novels, the 
impression created is that the flaw in the careers 
of four or five of the seven young men from 
Lorraine was not due to their uprooting, but to 
their lack of moral backbone. 

Paris is no more difficult a social medium to 
navigate in than New York; the French capital 
has been the battlefield of all French genius; 
but neither in New York nor in Paris can a 
young man face the conflict so loaded down with 
the burden of general ideas and with so scant a 
moral outfit as possessed by these same young men. 
The Lorraine band — is it a possible case? No 
doubt. Nevertheless, if its members had remained 
at Nancy they might have been shipwrecked for 
the same reason. Why does not M. Barres 

233 



EGOISTS 

show his cards? The Kingdom on the table! 
cries Hilda Wangel to her Masterbuilder. Love 
of the natal soil does not make a complete man", 
some of the greatest patriots have been the great- 
est scoundrels. M. Bourget sums up the situa- 
tion more lucidly than M. Barres, who is in such 
a hurry to mould citizens that he omits an essen- 
tial quality from his programme — God (or 
character, moral force, if you prefer other terms). 
Now, when a rationalistic philosopher considers 
God as an intellectual abstraction, he is not il- 
logical. Scepticism is his stock in trade. But 
can Maurice Barres elude the issue? Can he 
handle the tools of such pious workmen as Loyola, 
De Sales, and Thomas a Kempis, for the building 
of his soul, and calmly overlook the inspiration of 
those masons of men? It is one of the defects 
of dilettanteism that it furnishes a point d'appui 
for the liberated spirit to see-saw between free- 
will and determinism, between the Lord of Hosts 
and the Lucifer of Negation. Paul Bourget feels 
this spiritual dissonance. Has he not said that 
the day may come when Barres may repeat the 
phrase of Michelet : Je ne me peux passer de Dieu! 
Has Maurice Barres already plodded the same 
penitential route without indulging in an elliptical 
flight to a new artificial paradise ? 

If his moral evolution, so insistently claimed 
by his disciples, has been of a zigzag nature, if 
lacuna abound in his system and paradoxical 
vues d' ensemble often distract, yet logical evolu- 
tion there has been — from the maddest, ro- 
234 



MAURICE BARRES 

mantic individualism to a well-defined solidarity 
— and without attenuation of the dignity and 
utility of the Individual in the scheme of collectiv- 
ism. The Individual is the Salt of the State. 
The Individual leavens the mass politic. Num- 
bers will never supplant the value, psychic or 
economic, of the Individual. Emerson and Mat- 
thew Arnold said all this before Barres. Incom- 
parable artist as is Maurice Barres, we still must 
demand of him: " In Vishnu-land what Avatar!" 



235 



( 



VII 

PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

i 

THE WILL TO SUFFER 

Coleridge quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds as 
declaring that "the greatest man is he who forms 
the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who 
corrupts it." It is an elastic epigram and not un- 
like the rule which is poor because it won't work 
both ways. All master reformers, heretics, and 
rebels were at first great corrupters. It is a prime 
necessity in their propaganda. Aristophanes and 
Arius, Mohammed and Napoleon, Montaigne 
and Rabelais, Paul and Augustine, Luther and 
Calvin, Voltaire and Rousseau, Darwin and New- 
man, Liszt and Wagner, Kant and Schopenhauer 
— here are a few names of men who under- 
mined the current beliefs and practices of their 
times, whether for good or evil. Rousseau has 
been accused of being the greatest corrupter 
in history; yet to him we may owe the Consti- 
tution of the United States. Pascal, in prose of 
unequalled limpidity, denounced the Jesuits as 
corrupting youth. Nevertheless, Dr. Georg 
236 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

Brandes, an "intellectual" and a philosophic 
anarch, once wrote to Nietzsche: "I, too, love 
Pascal. But even as a young man I was on the 
side of the Jesuits against Pascal. Wise men, it 
was they who were right; he did not understand 
them; but they understood him and . . . they 
published his Provincial Letters with notes them- 
selves. The best edition is that of the Jesuits.' ' 
Were not Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt the 
three unspeakable devils of painting for Blake? 
Loosely speaking, then, it doesn't much matter 
whether one considers a great man as a regenerator 
or a corrupter. Napoleon was called the latter 
by Taine after he had been saluted as demigod 
by his idolatrous contemporaries. Nor does the 
case of Nietzsche differ much from his philo- 
sophic forerunners. He scolded Schopenhauer, 
though borrowing his dialectic tools, as he later 
mocked at the one sincere friendship of his 
lonely life, Richard Wagner's. We know the 
most objective philosophies are tinged by the 
individual temperaments of their makers, and 
perhaps the chief characteristic of all philoso- 
phers is their unphilosophic contempt for their 
fellow- thinkers. Nietzsche displayed this trait; 
so did Richard Wagner — who was in a lesser 
fashion an amateur philosopher, his system 
adorned by plumes borrowed from Feuerbach, 
Schelling, and Schopenhauer. Arthur Schopen- 
hauer was endowed with a more powerful intellect 
than either Wagner or Nietzsche. He "corrupted" 
them both. He was materialist enough to echo 

237 



EGOISTS 

the epigram attributed to Fontenelle: To be 
happy a man must have a good stomach and a 
wicked heart. 

Friedrich Nietzsche was more poet than original 
thinker. Merely to say Nay! to all existing in- 
stitutions is not to give birth to a mighty idea, 
though the gesture is brave. He substituted for 
Schopenhauer's "Will to Live" — (an ingenious 
variation of Kant's "Thing in Itself") the "Will to 
Power"; which phrase is mere verbal juggling. 
The late Eduard von Hartmann built his house of 
philosophy in the fog of the Unconscious ; Nietzsche, 
despising Darwin as a dull grubber, returned un- 
knowingly to the very land of metaphysics he 
thought he had fled forever. He was always 
the theologian — toujours seminariste, as they 
said of Renan. Theology was in his blood. It 
stiffened his bones. Abusing Christianity, par- 
ticularly Protestant Christianity, he was him- 
self an exponent of a theological odium of the 
virulent sort, as may be seen in his thunder- 
ing polemics. He held a brief for the other 
side of good and evil; but a man can't so 
easily empty his veins of the theologic blood of 
his forebears. It was his Nessus shirt and ended 
by consuming him. He had the romantic cult 
of great men, yet sneered at Carlyle for his Titan- 
ism. He believed in human perfectibility. He 
borrowed his Superman partly from the classic 
pantheon, partly from the hierarchy of Christian 
saints — or perhaps from the very Cross he vituper- 
ated. The only Christian, he was fond of say- 

238 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

ing, died on the Cross. The only Nietzschian, 
one might reply, passed away when crumbled the 
brilliant brain of Nietzsche. Saturated with the 
culture of Goethe, his Superman was sent balloon- 
ing aloft by the poetic afflatus of Nietzsche. 

He was an apparition possible only in modern 
and rationalistic Protestant Germany. Like a voice 
from the Middle Ages he has stirred the profound 
phlegm and spiritual indifference of his fellow 
countrymen. But he has in him more of Savo- 
narola than Luther — Luther, who was for him 
the apotheosis of all that is hateful in the German 
character: the self-satisfied philistinism, sensu- 
ality, beer and tobacco, unresponsiveness to all 
the finer issues of existence, pious tactlessness and 
harsh dogmatism. 

His truth is enclosed in a transcendental 
vacuum. Whether he had Galton's science of 
Eugenics in his mind when he modelled his Zara- 
thustra we need not concern ourselves. His re- 
valuation of moral values has not shaken morality 
to its centre. He challenged superficial conven- 
tional morality, but the ultimate pillars of faith 
still stand. He reminds us of William Blake w T hen 
he writes: "The path to one's heaven ever leads 
through the voluptuousness of one's ow r n hell. ,, 
And his psychical resemblance to Pascal is stri- 
king. Both men were physically debilitated; their 
nervous systems, overwhelmed by the burdens 
they imposed upon them, made their days and 
nights a continuous agony. The Nietzschian 
philosophy may be negligible, but the psychologi- 

239 



EGOISTS 

cal aspects of this singularly versatile, fascinating, 
and contradictory nature are not. His "Will to 
Power' ' in his own case resolves itself into the 
will to suffer. Compared to his, Schopenhauer's 
pessimism is the good-natured grumbling of a 
healthy, witty man, with a tremendous vital tem- 
perament. Nietzsche was delicate from youth. 
His experiences in the Franco-Prussian war 
harmed him.- Headache, eye trouble, a weak 
stomach, coupled with his abuse of intellectual 
work, and, toward the last, indulgence in nar- 
cotics for insomnia, all coloured his philosophy. 
The personal bias was unescapable, and this 
bias favoured sickness, not health. Hence his 
frantic apotheosis of health, the dance and laugh- 
ter, and his admiration for Bizet's Carmen. 
Hence his constant employment of joyful image- 
ry, of bold defiance to the sober workaday world. 
His famous injunction: "Be hard!" was meant 
for his own unhappy soul, ever nearing, like 
Pascal's, the abyss of black melancholy. 

While we believe that too much stress has been 
laid upon the pathologic side of Pascal's and 
Nietzsche's characters, there is no evading the 
fact that both seemed tinged with what Kurt 
Eisner calls psychopathia spiritualis. The refer- 
ences to suffering in Nietzsche's books are sig- 
nificant. There is a vibrating accent of personal 
sorrow on every page. He lived in an inferno, 
mental and physical. We are given to praising 
Robert Louis Stevenson for his cheerfulness in 
the dire straits of his illness. He was a mere 

240 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

amateur of misery, a professional invalid, in 
comparison with Nietzsche. And how cruel 
was the German poet to himself. He tied 
his soul to a stake and recorded the poignant 
sensations of his spiritual auto-da-fe. At the 
close of his sane days we find him taking a 
dolorous pride in his capacity for suffering. "It 
is great affliction only — that long, slow affliction 
in which we are burned' as it were with green wood, 
which takes time — that compels us philosophers 
to descend into our ultimate depth and divest 
ourselves of all trust, all good nature, glossing, 
gentleness. ... I doubt whether such affliction 
improves us; but I know that it deepens us. . . . 
Oh, how repugnant to one henceforth is gratifica- 
tion, coarse, dull, drab-coloured gratification, as 
usually understood by those who enjoy life ! . . . 
Profound suffering makes noble; it separates. 
. . . There are free, insolent minds that would 
fain conceal and deny that at the bottom they 
are disjointed, incurable souls — it is the case 
with Hamlet." Nietzsche has the morbidly in- 
trospective Hamlet temper, and Pascal has been 
called the Christian Hamlet. 

We read in Overbeck's recollections that 
Nietzsche manifested deep interest in the person- 
ality of Pascal. Both hated hypocrisy. But the 
German thinker saw in the Frenchman of genius 
only a Christian who hugged his chains, one 
who for his faith suffered "a continuous suicide of 
reason." (Has not Nietzsche himself also said 
hard things about Reason?) "One is punished 
241 



EGOISTS 

best by one's virtues" . . . or, "He who fights 
with monsters, let him be careful lest he thereby 
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into 
an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee." This 
last is unquestionably a reminiscence of Pascal. 
He could not endure with equanimity Pascal's 
sacrifizio delV intelletto, not realizing that the 
Frenchman felt beneath his feet the solid globe 
of faith. He discerned the Puritan in Pascal, 
though failing to recognise the Puritan in himself. 
Despite his praise of the Dionysian element in 
art and life, a puritan was buried in the nerves of 
Nietzsche. He never could tolerate the common 
bourgeois joys. Wine, Woman, Song, and their 
poets, were his detestations. Yet he hated Puritan- 
ism in Protestant Christianity. "The dangerous 
thrill of repentance spasms, the vivisection of con- 
science," he contemns; "even in every desire for 
knowledge there is a drop of cruelty." He wrote 
to Brandes: "Physically, too, I lived for years in 
the neighbourhood of death. This was my great 
piece of good fortune; I forgot myself. I out- 
lived myself — a shedding of the skin." Pascal 
also knew the sting of the flesh and brain. From 
the time he had an escape from sudden death, he 
was conscious of an abyss at his side. "Men of 
genius," he wrote, "have their heads higher but 
their feet lower than the rest of us." With Nietz- 
sche there was a darker nuance of pain; he speaks 
somewhere of "the philtre of the great Circe of 
mingled pleasure and cruelty." His soul was a 
mysterious palimpsest. The heart has its reasons, 

242 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

cried Pascal; of Nietzsche's heart the last word 
has not been written. 

His criticism of Pascal was not clement. He 
said: "In Goethe the superabundance becomes 
creative, in Flaubert the hatred; Flaubert, a new 
edition of Pascal, but as an artist with instinctive 
judgment at bottom. . . . He tortured himself 
when he composed, quite as Pascal tortured him- 
self when he thought." Yes, but Nietzsche was 
as fierce a hater as Pascal or Flaubert. He set 
up for Christianity a straw adversary and pro- 
ceeded to demolish it. He forgot that, as Fran- 
cis Thompson has it: "It is the severed head that 
makes the Seraph." Nietzsche would not look 
higher than the mud around the pedestal. He, 
poor sufferer, was not genuinely impersonal. His 
tragedy was his sick soul and body. "If a man 
cannot sing as he carries his cross, he had better 
drop it," advises Havelock Ellis. Nietzsche 
bore a terrible cross — like the men staggering 
with their chimeras in Baudelaire's poem — but 
he did not bear it with equanimity. We must 
not be deceived by his desperate gayety. As 
a married man he w T ould never have enjoyed, 
as did John Stuart Mill, spiritual henpeckery. 
He was afraid of life, this dazzling Zarathustra, 
who went on Icarus- wings close to the sun. He 
could speak of women thus: "We think woman 
deep — why? Because we never find any foun- 
dation in her. Woman is not even shallow." 
Or, "Woman would like to believe that love can 
do all — it is a superstition peculiar to herself. 

243 



EGOISTS 

Alas! he who knows the heart finds out how 
poor, helpless, pretentious, and liable to error even 
the best, the deepest love is — how it rather 
destroys than saves." 

Der Dichter spricht! Also the bachelor. Once 
a Hilda of the younger generation, Lou Salome by 
name, came knocking at the door of the poet's 
heart. It was in vain. The wings of a great 
happiness touched his brow as it passed. No 
wonder he wrote: "The desert grows; woe to 
him who hides deserts"; "Woman unlearns the 
fear of man"; "Thou goest to women! Re- 
member thy whip." (Always this resounding 
motive of cruelty.) "Thy soul will be dead even 
sooner than thy body"; "Once spirit became 
God; then it became man; and now it is becom- 
ing mob"; "And many a one who went into the 
desert and suffered thirst with the camels, merely 
did not care to sit around the cistern with dirty 
camel-drivers." Here is the aristocratic radical. 

It is weakness, admitted Goethe, not to possess 
the capacity for noble indignation; but Nietzsche 
was obsessed by his indignations. His voice, 
that golden poet's voice, becomes too often shrill, 
cracked, and falsetto. Voltaire has remarked 
that the first man who compared a woman to a 
rose was a poet, the second a fool. In his atti- 
tude toward Woman, Nietzsche was neither fool 
nor poet; but he never called her a rose. Nor 
was he a cynic; he saw too clearly for that, and 
he had suffered. Suffering, however, should have 
been a bond with women. Despite his cruel 

244 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

utterances he enjoyed several ideal friendships 
with cultivated women. " There is no happy life 
for woman — the advantage that the world offers 
her is her choice in self-sacrifice," wrote Mr. 
Howells. Gossip has whispered that he was 
hopelessly in love with Cosima Wagner. A 
charming theme for a psychological novel. So 
was Von Blilow, once — until he married her; so, 
Anton Rubinstein. Both abused Wagner's music; 
Von Biilow after he became an advocate of 
Brahms; Rubinstein always. Nietzsche, just 
before 1876, experienced the pangs of a Wagnerian 
reactionary. A pretty commentary this upon 
masculine mental superiority if one woman (even 
such a remarkable creature as Cosima) could up- 
set the stanchest convictions of these three men. 
And convictions, asserted Nietzsche, are prisons. 
He contrived to escape from many intellectual 
prisons. Cosima had proved the one inflexible 
jailer. 

Merciless to himself, he did not spare others. 
Of Altruism, with its fundamental contradic- 
tions, he wrote: 

A being capable of purely altruistic actions alone 
is more fabulous than the Phoenix. Never has a man 
done anything solely for others, and without any 
personal motive; how could the Ego act without Ego ? 
. . . Suppose a man wished to do and to will every- 
thing for others, nothing for himself, the latter would 
be impossible, for the very good reason that he must 
do very much for himself, in order to do anything at 
all for others. Moreover, it presupposes that the 

245 



EGOISTS 

other is egoist enough constantly to accept these sacri- 
fices made for him; so that the men of love and self- 
sacrifice have an interest in the continued existence of 
loveless egoists who are incapable of self-sacrifice. 
In order to subsist, the highest morality must positively 
enforce the existence of immorality. — (Menschliches, 
I, 137-8). 

" Nietzsche's criticism on this point," remarks 
Professor Seth Pattison, "must be accepted as 
conclusive. Every theory which attempts to 
divorce the ethical end from the personality of 
the moral agent must necessarily fall into this 
vicious circle; in a sense, the moral centre and 
the moral motive must always ultimately be self, 
the satisfaction of the self, the perfection of the 
self. The altruistic virtues, and self-sacrifice in 
general, can only enter into the moral ideal so 
far as they minister to the realisation of what 
is recognised to be the highest type of manhood, the 
self which finds its own in all men's good. Apart 
from this, self-sacrifice, self-mortification for its 
own sake, w r ould be a mere negation, and, as 
such, of no moral value whatever." 

Hasn't this the familiar ring of Max Stirner 
and his doctrine of the Ego ? 

Nietzsche with Pascal would have assented 
that "illness is the natural state of the true 
Christian." There was in both thinkers a tend- 
ency toward self-laceration of the conscience. 
"II faut s'abetir," wrote Pascal; and Nietzsche's 
pride vanished in the hot fire of suffering. The 
Pascal injunction to stupefy ourselves was not 
246 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

to imitate the beasts of the field, but was a counsel 
of humility. Montaigne in his essay on Raymond 
de Sebonde wrote before Pascal concerning the 
danger of overwrought sensibility; (II nous faut 
abestir pour nous assagir, is the original old 
French). It would have been wise for Nietzsche 
to follow Pascal's advice. "We live alone, 
we die alone," sorrowfully wrote the greatest 
religious force of the past century, Cardinal 
Newman (a transposition of Pascal's "Nous 
mourrons seuls"). Nietzsche was the loneliest 
of poets. He lived on the heights and paid the 
penalty, like other exalted searchers after the 
vanished vase of the ideal. 

II 
NIETZSCHE'S APOSTASY 

Although Macaulay called Horace Walpole 
a "wretched fribble," that gossip knew a trick or 
two in fancy fencing. "Oh," he wrote, "I am 
sick of visions and systems that shove one another 
aside and come again like figures in a moving 
picture." This was the outburst of a man called 
insincere and fickle, but frank in this instance. 
Issuing from the mouth of Friedrich Nietzsche 
this cry of the entertaining, shallow Walpole 
would have been curiously apposite. The un- 
happy German poet and philosopher suffered 
during his intellectual life from the "moving 
pictures" of other men's visions and systems, 

247 



EGOISTS 

and when he finally escaped them all and evoked 
his own dream-world his brain became over- 
clouded and he passed away "trailing clouds 
of glory.' ' It is an imperative necessity for cer- 
tain natures to change their opinions, to slough, 
as sloughs a snake its skin, their master ideas. 
Renan went still further when he asserted that 
all essayists contradict themselves sometime 
during their life. 

With Nietzsche the apparent contradictions 
of his Wagner-worship and Wagner-hatred may 
be explained if we closely examine the concepts of 
his first work of importance, The Birth of Trag- 
edy. It was a misfortune that his bitterest book, 
The Wagner Case, should have been first trans- 
lated into English, for Wagner is our music-maker 
now, and the rude assaults of Nietzsche fall upon 
deaf ears; while those who had read the earlier 
essay, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, were both 
puzzled and outraged. Certainly the man who 
could thus flout what he once adored must have 
been mad. This was the popular verdict, a facile 
and unjust verdict. What Nietzsche first postul- 
ated as to the nature of music he returned to at 
the close of his life; the mighty personality of 
Richard Wagner had deflected the stream of his 
thought for a few years. But as early as 1872 
doubts began to trouble his sensitive conscience 
— this was before his pamphlet Richard Wagner 
in Bayreuth — and his notebooks of that period 
were sown with question-marks. In the interest- 
ing correspondence with Dr. Georg Brandes, who 
248 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

literally revealed to Europe the genius of Nietzsche, 
we find this significant passage: 

I was the first to distil a sort of unity out of the two 
[Schopenhauer and Wagner]. . . . All the Wagnerians 
are disciples of Schopenhauer. Things were different 
when I was young. Then it was the last of the He- 
gelians who clung to Wagner, and " Wagner and 
Hegel" was still the cry in the '50s. 

Nietzsche might have added the name of the 
philosopher Feuerbach. Wagner's English apolo- 
gist, Ashton Ellis, repudiates the common belief 
that Wagner refashioned the latter part of the 
Ring so as to introduce in it his newly acquired 
Schopenhauerian ideas. Wagner was always a 
pessimist, declares Mr. Ellis; Schopenhauer 
but confirmed him in his theories. Wagner, like 
Nietzsche, was too often a weathercock. A 
second-rate poet and philosopher, he stands 
chiefly for his magnificent music. Nietzsche or 
any other polemiker cannot change the map of 
music by fulminating against Wagner. Time 
may prove his true foe — the devouring years that 
always show such hostility to music of the the- 
atre, music that is not pure music. 

The spirit of the letter to Brandes quoted above 
may be found in Nietzsche Contra Wagner (The 
Case of Wagner, page 72). Nietzsche wrote: 

I similarly interpreted Wagner's music in my own 
way as the expression of a Dionysian powerfulness of 

249 



EGOISTS 

soul. ... It is obvious what I misunderstood, it is 
obvious in like manner what I bestowed upon Wagner 
and Schopenhauer — myself. 

He read his own enthusiasms, his Hellenic 
ideals, into the least Greek among composers. 
Wagner himself was at first pleased, also not a 
little nonplussed by the idolatry of Nietzsche. 
Remember that this young philologist was a 
musician as well as a brilliant scholar. 

Following Schopenhauer in his main conten- 
tion that music is a presentative, not a repre- 
sentative art; the noumenon, not the phenomenon 
— as are, for instance, painting and sculpture — 
Nietzsche held that the unity of music is unde- 
niable. There is no dualism, such as instru- 
mental music and vocal music. Sung music is 
only music presented by a sonorous vocal organ; 
the words are negligible. A poem may be a 
starting-point for the composer, yet in poetry 
there is not the potentiality of tone (this does not 
naturally refer to the literary tone-quality of 
music). From a non-musical thing music can- 
not be evolved. There is only absolute music. 
Its beginning is absolute. All other is a masquer- 
ading. The dramatic singer is a monstrosity — 
the actual words of Nietzsche. Opera is a de- 
based genre. We almost expect the author to 
deny, as denied Hanslick, music any content 
whatsoever. But this he does not. He is too 
much the Romantic. For him the poem of Tristan 
was but the " vapour" of the music. 

250 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

Music is the archetype of the arts. It is the 
essence of Greek tragedy and therefore pessi- 
mistic. Tragedy is pessimism. The two faces 
of the Greek art he calls the Apollonian and the 
Dionysian impulses. One is the Classic, the 
other the Romantic; calm beauty as opposed 
to bacchantic ecstasy. Wagner, Nietzsche identi- 
fied with the Dionysian element, and he was not 
far wrong; but Greek? The passionate welter 
of this new music stirred Nietzsche's excitable 
young nerves. He was, like many of his con- 
temporaries, swept away in the boiling flood of 
the Wagnerian sea. It appeared to him, the 
profound Greek scholar, as a recrudescence of 
Dionysian joy. Instead, it was the topmost crest 
of the dying waves of Romanticism. Nietzsche 
later realised this fact. To Brandes he wrote: 

Your German romanticism has made me reflect 
how the whole movement only attained its goal in 
music (Schumann, Mendelssohn, Weber, Wagner, 
Brahms); in literature it stopped short with a huge 
promise — the French were more fortunate. I am 
afraid I am too much of a musician not to be a Ro- 
manticist. Without music life would be a mistake. 
. . . With regard to the effect of Tristan I could tell 
you strange things. A good dose of mental torture 
strikes me as an excellent tonic before a meal of 
Wagner. 

Nietzsche loved Wagner the man more than 
Wagner the musician. The news of Wagner's 
death in 1883 was a terrible blow for him. He 

251 



EGOISTS 

wrote Frau Wagner a letter of condolence, which 
was answered from Bayreuth by her daughter 
Daniela von Bulow. (See the newly published 
Overbeck Letters.) 

Nothing could be more unfair than to ascribe 
to Nietzsche petty motives in his breaking off 
with Wagner. There were minor differences, 
but it was Parsifal and its drift toward Rome, 
that shocked the former disciple. What he wrote 
of Wagner and Wagnerism may be interpreted 
according to one's own views, but the Parsifal 
criticism is sound. That parody of the Roman 
Catholic ceremonial and ideas, and the glorifica- 
tion of its psychopathic hero, with the consequent 
degradation of the idea of womanhood, Nietzsche 
saw and denounced. "I despise everyone who 
does not regard Parsifal as an outrage on morals/' 
he cried. To-day his denunciations are recognised 
by wise folk as wisdom. He first heard Carmen in 
Genoa, November 27, 1881. To his exacerbated 
nerves its rich southern melodies were soothing. 
He overpraised the opera — which is a sparkling 
compound of Gounod and Spanish gypsy airs; an 
olla podrida as regards style. He knew that this 
was bonbon music compared with Wagner. And 
the confession was wrung from his lips: "We 
must first be Wagnerians." Thus, as he es- 
caped from Schopenhauer's pessimism, he plucked 
from his heart his affection for Wagner. He 
had become Zarathustra. He painted Wagner 
as an "ideal monster," but the severing of the 
friendship cost Nietzsche his happiness. An 
252 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

extraordinary mountain-mania attacked him on 
the heights of the upper Engadine. All that he 
had once admired he now hated. He had a 
positive genius for hatred, even more so than 
Huysmans; both writers were bilious melan- 
cholies, and both were alike in the display of 
heavy-handed irony. With Nietzsche's "ears 
for quarter tones' ' — as he told Brandes — it 
would have been far better for him to remain 
with Peter Gast in Italy, while the latter was 
writing that long-contemplated study on Chopin. 
Nietzsche loved the music of the Pole who had 
introduced into the heavy monochrome of Ger- 
man harmonies an exotic and chromatic gamut 
of colours. 

If Wagner erred in his belief that it was the 
drama not the music which ruled in his own com- 
positions (for his talk about the welding of the 
different arts is an aesthetic nightmare), why 
should not Nietzsche have made a mistake in 
ascribing to Wagner his own exalted ideals? 
Wagner's music is the Wagner music drama. 
That is a commonplace of criticism — though 
not at Bayreuth. Nietzsche taught the supremacy 
of tone in his early book. He detested so-called 
musical realism. These two men became friends 
through a series of mutual misunderstandings. 
When Nietzsche discovered that music and phil- 
osophy had naught in common — and he had 
hoped that Wagner's would prove the solvent — 
he cooled off in his faith. It was less an apostasy 
than we believe. Despite his eloquent affirma- 

253 



EGOISTS 

tion of Wagnerism, Nietzsche was never in his 
innermost soul a Wagnerian. Nor yet was he 
insincere. This may seem paradoxical. He had 
felt the "pull" of Wagner's genius, and, as in 
the case of his Schopenhauer worship, he tempo- 
rarily lost his critical bearings. This accounts for 
his bitterness when he found the feet of his idol to 
be clay. He was lashing his own bare soul in 
each scarifying phrase he applied to Wagner. 
He saw the free young Siegfried become the old 
Siegfried in the manacles of determinism and 
pessimism; then followed Parsifal and Wagner's 
apostasy — Nietzsche believed Wagner was going 
back to Christianity. There is more consistency 
in the case of Friedrich Nietzsche than has been 
acknowledged by the Wagnerians. He, the 
philosopher of decadence and romanticism, could 
have said to Wagner as Baudelaire to Manet: 
"You are only the first in the decrepitude of 
your art." 

If Nietzsche considered the poem a vaporous 
background for the passionate musical mosaic of 
Tristan and Isolde, what would he have thought 
if he could have heard the tonal interpretation of 
his Also Sprach Zarathustra, as conceived by the 
mathematical and emotional brain of Richard 
Strauss ? I recall the eagerness with which I asked 
an impossible question of Frau Foerster-Nietzsche 
when at the Nietzsche- Archive, Weimar, in 1904: 
Is this tone-poem by Richard Strauss truly Nietz- 
schean ? Her tact did not succeed in quite veiling a 
hint of dubiety, though the noble sister of the dead 
254 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

philosopher was too tender-hearted to suggest a 
formal criticism of the composer's imposing sound- 
palace. It is not, however, difficult to imagine 
Nietzsche, alive, glaring in dismay and with " em- 
bellished indignation" as he hears the dance theme 
in Zarathustra. Nor would he be less surprised 
if he had suddenly forced upon his consciousness 
a performance of Claude Debussy's mooning, 
mystic, triste Pelleas et Melisande, with its in- 
vertebrate charm, its innocuous sensuousness, 
its absence of thematic material, its perverse 
harmonies, its lack of rhythmic variety, and its 
faded sweetness, like that evoked by musty, 
quaint tapestry in languid motion. (Debussy 
might have delved deeper into churchly modes 
and for novelty's sake even employed pneumes 
to lend his score a still more venerable aspect. 
Certainly his tonalities are on the other side of 
diatonic and chromatic. Why not call them 
pneumatic scales?) Surely Nietzsche could not 
have refrained from exclaiming: Ah! the pathos of 
distance! Ah! what musical sins thou must take 
upon thee, Richard Wagner ! Strauss and Debussy 
are the legitimate fruits of thy evil tree of music ! 
Miserably happy poet, like one of those Oriental 
wonder-workers dancing in ecstasy on white-hot 
sword-blades, the tears all the while streaming 
down his cheeks as he proclaims his new gospel 
of joy: "II faut mediterraniser la fnusique" 
Alas! the pathos of Nietzsche's reality. Reality 
for this self-tortured Hamlet-soul was a spiritual 
crucifixion and a spiritual tragedy. 

255 



EGOISTS 

III 

ANTICHRIST? 

The penalty of misrepresentation and misinter- 
pretation seems to be attached to every new idea 
that comes to birth through the utterances of 
genius. At first with Wagner it was the "noise- 
making Wagner" — whereas he is a master of 
plangent harmonies. Ibsen, we were told, couldn't 
write a play. His dramatic technique is nearly 
faultless; in reality, with its unities there is a sus- 
picion of the academic in it and a perilous ap- 
proach to the Chinese ivory mechanism of Scribe. 
And paint, Paris asserted, the late Edouard 
Manet could not. It was precisely his almost 
miraculous manipulation of paint that sets this 
artist apart from his fellows. The same tactless 
rating of Friedrich Nietzsche has prevailed in the 
general critical and popular imagination. Nietz- 
sche has become the bugaboo of timid folk. He 
has been denounced as the Antichrist; yet he has 
been the subject of a discriminating study in such 
a conservative magazine as the Catholic World. 
Thanks to the conception of some writers, Nietz- 
sche and the Nietzschians are gigantic brutes, a 
combination of Genghis Khan and Bismarck, 
terrifying apparitions wearing mustachios like 
yataghans, eyes rolling in frenzy, with a philosophy 
that ranged from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter, 
and with a consuming atheism as a side attraction. 

256 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

Need we protest that this is Nietzsche misread, 
Nietzsche butchered to make a stupid novelist's 
holiday. 

Ideas to be vitally effective must, like scenery, 
be run on during the exact act of the contempo- 
rary drama. The aristocratic individualism of 
Nietzsche came at a happy moment when the 
stage was bare yet encumbered with the debris 
of socialistic theories left over from the storm 
that first swept all Europe in 1848. It was neces- 
sary that the pendulum should swing in another 
direction. The small voice of Max Stirner — 
who, as the French would say, imitated Nietzsche 
in advance — was swallowed in the universal 
gabble of sentimental humanitarianism preached 
from pulpits and barricades. Nietzsche's ap- 
pearance marked one of those precise psychologi- 
cal moments when the rehabilitation of an old 
idea in a new garment of glittering rhetoric would 
resemble a new dispensation. For over a decade 
now the fame and writings of the Saxon-born 
philosopher have traversed the intellectual life of 
the Continent. He was translated into a dozen 
languages, he was expounded, schools sprang up 
and his disciples fought furious battles in his 
name. His doctrines, because of their dynamic 
revolutionary quality, were impudently annexed 
by men whose principles would have been ab- 
horrent to the unfortunate thinker. Nietzsche, 
who his life long had attacked socialism in its 
myriad shapes, was captured by the socialists. 
However, the regression of the wave of admira- 

257 



EGOISTS 

tion has begun not only in Germany but in France, 
once his greatest stronghold. The real Nietzsche, 
undimmed by violent partisanship and equally vio- 
lent antagonism, has emerged. No longer is he a 
bogey man, not a creature of blood and iron, not 
a constructive or an academic philosopher, but 
simply a brilliant and suggestive thinker who, be- 
cause of the nature of his genius, could never 
have erected an elaborate philosophic system, and 
a writer not quite as dangerous to established re- 
ligion and morals as some critics would have us 
believe. He most prided himself on his common 
sense, on his "realism," as contradistinguished 
from the cobweb-spinning idealisms of his philo- 
sophic predecessors. 

Early in 1908 a book was published at Jena 
entitled Franz Overbeck and Friedrich Nietzsche, 
by Carl Albrecht Bernouilli. In it at great length 
and with clearness was described the friendship of 
Overbeck — a well-known church historian and 
culture-novelist, born at St. Petersburg of Ger- 
man and English parents — and Nietzsche during 
their Basel period. Interesting is the story of 
his relations with Richard Wagner and Jacob 
Burckhardt, the historian of the Renaissance. 
As a youth Nietzsche had won the praises of both 
Rietschl and Burckhardt for his essay on Theog- 
nis. This was before 1869, in which year at the 
age of twenty-six he took his doctor's degree and 
accepted the chair of classical philology at Basel. 
His friend Overbeck noted his dangerously rapid 
intellectual development and does not fail to re- 
258 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

cord, what has never been acknowledged by the 
dyed-in-the-wool Nietzschians, that the " Master' ' 
had read and inwardly digested Max Stirner's 
anarchistic work, The Ego and His Own. Not 
only is this long-denied fact set forth, but Over- 
beck, in a careful analysis, reaches the positive 
conclusion that, notwithstanding his profound 
erudition, his richly endowed nature, Friedrich 
Nietzsche is not one of the world's great men; 
that in his mad endeavour to carve himself into 
the semblance of his own Superman he wrecked 
brain and body. 

The sad irony of this book lies in the fact that 
the sister of Nietzsche, Frau Foerster-Nietzsche, 
who nursed the poet-philosopher from the time 
of his breakdown in 1888 till his death in 1900; 
who for twenty years has by pen and personally 
made such a successful propaganda for his ideas, 
was in at least three letters — for the first time 
published by Bernouilli — insulted grievously 
by her brother. This posthumous hatred as ex- 
pressed in the acrid prose of Nietzsche is terribly 
disenchanting. He calls her a meddlesome woman 
without a particle of understanding of his ideals. 
He declares that she martyred him, made him 
ridiculous, and in the last letter he wrote her, 
dated December, 1886, he wonders at the enigma 
of fate that made two persons of such different 
temperaments blood-relatives. Bernouilli, the 
editor of these Overbeck letters, adds insult to 
injury by calling the unselfish, noble-minded 
sister and biographer of her brother a tyrannical 

259 



EGOISTS 

and not very intellectual person, who often 
wounded her brother with her advice and criti- 
cism. 

Peter Gast doubts the authenticity of these let- 
ters, for, as he truthfully points out, the love of 
Nietzsche for his sister, as evidenced by an ample 
correspondence, was great. We recall the touch- 
ing exclamation of the sick philosopher when once 
at his sister's house in Weimar he saw her weeping: 
" Don't cry, little sister, we are all so happy now." 
That "now" had a sinister significance, for the 
brilliant thinker was quite helpless and incapable 
of reading through the page of a book, though he 
was never the lunatic pictured by some of his 
opponents. A deep melancholy had settled upon 
his soul and he died without enjoying the light 
of a returned reason. It has not occurred to 
German critics that these letters even if genuine 
are the product of a diseased imagination. Nietz- 
sche became a very suspicious man after his break 
with Wagner. He suffered from the mania of 
persecution. He hated mankind and fled to the 
heights of Sils-Maria to escape what Poe aptly 
described as the "tyranny of the human face." 

The first thing that occurs to one after reading 
Beyond Good and Evil is that Nietzsche is more 
French than German. It is well known that his 
favourites were the pens'ee writers, Pascal, La 
Bruy&re, La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Cham- 
fort, Vauvenargues. A peripatetic because of 
chronic ill health — he had the nerves of a Shelley 
and the stomach of a Carlyle — his ideas were 
260 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

jotted down during his long walks in the Enga- 
dine. Naturally they assumed the form of aphor- 
isms, epigrams, jeux d? esprit. With his increasing 
illness came the inability to w T rite more than a few 
pages of connected thoughts. His best period was 
between the years 1877 and 1882. He had at- 
tacked Schopenhauer; he wished to be free to go 
up to the "heights" unimpeded by the baggage 
of other men's ideas. It was with disquietude 
that his friends witnessed the growing self-exalta- 
tion that may be noted in the rhapsodical Zara- 
thustra. 

He felt the ground sinking under him — his 
pride of intellect Luciferian in intensity — and 
his latter works were a desperate challenge to 
his darkening brain and the world that refused 
to recognize his value. 

Nietzsche had the true ascetic's temperament. 
He lived the life of a strenuous saint, and his 

'Beyond Good and Evil might land us in a barren 
desert, where austerity would rule our daily con- 
duct. To become a Superman one must re- 
nounce the world. It was the easy-going, down- 
at-the-heel morality of the world, its carrying 
water on both shoulders, that stirred the wrath of 
this earnest man of blameless life and provoked 
from him so much brilliant and fascinating prose. 
He wrote a swift, golden German. He was a 
stylist. The great culture hero of his day, nour- 
ished on Latin and Greek, he waged war against 

'the moral ideas of his generation and ruined his 

intellect in the unequal conflict. He turned on 

261 



EGOISTS 

himself and rended his soul into shreds rather 
than join in the affirmations of recognised faith. 
Yet what eloquent, touching pages he has de- 
voted to the founder of the Christian religion. 
His last signature in the letter to Brandes reveals 
the preoccupation of his memory with the religion 
he despised. Nietzsche made the great renunci- 
ation of inherited faith and committed spiritual 
suicide. Libraries are filled with the works of 
his commentators, eager to make of him what 
he was not. He has been shamelessly exploited. 
He has been called the forerunner of Pragmatism. 
He was a poet, an artist, who saw life as a gor- 
geously spun dream, not as a dreary phalanstery. 
He belonged rather to Goethe and Faust than to 
Schopenhauer or the positivists. Hellenism was 
his first and last love. 

The correspondence between Nietzsche and 
his famulus, the musician Peter Gast — whose 
real name is Heinrich Koselitz — from 1876 to 
1889, appeared last autumn and comprises 278 
letters. Another Nietzsche appears — gentle, suf- 
ering, as usual still hopeful. He loves Italy; 
at the end, Turin is his favourite city. There is 
little except in the final communication to show 
a mind cracking asunder. No doubt this cor- 
respondence was given to the world as an offset 
to the Overbeck-Bernouilli letters. 

Leslie Stephen declared that no one ever wrote 

a dull autobiography, and risking a bull, added, 

"The very dulness would be interesting." Yet 

one is not afraid to maintain that Friedrich 

262 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

Nietzsche's autobiography is rather a disappoint- 
ment; possibly because too much was expected. 
It should not be forgotten that Nietzsche, when 
at Wagner's villa Triebschen, near Lucerne, read 
and corrected Wagner's autobiography, which is 
yet to see the light of publication. He seems to 
have violated certain confidences, for he was the 
first — that is, in latter years — to revive the story of 
Wagner's blood relationship to his stepfather, 
Ludwig Geyer. In Leipsic this was a thrice-told 
tale. Moreover, he warned us to be suspicious of 
great men's autobiographies and then wrote one 
himself, wrote it in three weeks, beginning October 
15, 1888, the forty-fourth anniversary of his birth, 
and ending with difficulty November 4. It rings 
sincere, and was composed at white heat, but un- 
happily for this present curious generation of 
Nietzsche readers it tells very little that is new. 

Notwithstanding Nietzsche's wish that the book 
should not exceed in price over a mark and a half, 
a limited edition de luxe has been put forth with 
the acquiescence of the Nietzsche archive, Weimar, 
and at a high price. This edition is limited to 
1,250 copies. It is clearly printed, but the deco- 
rative element is rather bizarre. Henry Van de- 
Velde of the Weimar Art School is the designer of 
the title and ornaments. Raoul Richter, professor 
at the Leipsic University, has written a few appre- 
ciative words at the close. 

Nietzsche was at Turin, November, 1888. 
There he wrote the following to Professor Georg 
Brandes, the celebrated Copenhagen critic: "I 
263 



EGOISTS 

have now revealed myself with a cynicism that 
will become historical. The book is called Ecce 
Homo and is against everything Christian. . . . 
I am after all the first psychologist of Christianity, 
and like the old artillerist I am, I can bring for- 
ward cannon of which no opponent of Christianity 
has even suspected the existence. ... I lay down 
my oath that in two years we shall have the whole 
earth in convulsions. I am a fatality. Guess who 
it is that comes off worst in Ecce Homo? The 
Germans! I have said, awful things to them." 
This was the "golden autumn" of his life, as he 
confessed to his sister Elizabeth. In a little over 
four weeks from the date of the letter to Brandes 
Nietzsche went mad, after a stroke of apoplexy in 
Turin. The collapse must have taken place be- 
tween January i and 3, 1889. Brandes received 
a card signed "The Crucified One"; Overbeck, 
his old friend at Basel, was also agitated by a few 
lines in which Nietzsche proclaimed himself the 
King of Kings; while to Cosima Wagner at Bay- 
reuth was sent a communication which read, 
" Ariadne, I love you! Dionysos." Like Tolstoy, 
Nietzsche suffered from theomania and prophecy, 
madness. 

These details are not in the autobiography but 
may be found in Dr. Mugge's excellent study just 
published, Nietzsche, His Life and Work. Over- 
beck started for Turin and there found his poor old 
companion giving away his money, dancing, sing- 
ing, declaiming verse, and playing snatches of 
crazy music on the pianoforte. He was taken back 
264 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

to Basel and was gentle on the trip except that in 
the Saint-Gothard tunnel he sang a poem of his, 
" An der Brticke," which appears in the autobiog- 
raphy. His mother brought him from Switzerland 
to Naumburg; thence to Dr. Binsw anger's estab- 
lishment at Jena. Later he lived in his sister's 
home at Upper Weimar, and from the balcony, 
where he spent his days, he could see a beautiful 
landscape. He was melancholy rather than mad, 
never violent — this his sister has personally assured 
me — and occasionally surprised those about him 
by flashes of memory; but full consciousness was 
not to be again enjoyed by him. Overwork, chloral, 
and despair at the " conspiracy of silence" caused 
his brain to crumble. He had attained his " Great 
Noon," Zarathustra's Noon, during the closing 
days of 1888. In August, 1900, came the eutha- 
nasia for which he had longed. 

There is internal evidence that the autobiog- 
raphy was written under exalted nervous condi- 
tions. The aura of insanity hovers about its pages. 
Yet Nietzsche has seldom said so many brilliant, 
ironical, and savage things. He melts over mem- 
ories of Wagner, the one friendship of a life 
crowded with friends and cursed by solitude. He 
sets out to smash Christianity, but he expressed 
the hope that the book would fall into the 
hands of the intellectual elite. He divides his 
theme into the following heads: Why I Am So 
Clever: Why I Am So Sage: Why I Write Such 
Good Books : Why I Am a Fatality. (You recall 
here the letter to Brandes.) He ranges from the 

265 



EGOISTS 

abuse of bad German cookery to Kantian met- 
aphysics. He calls Ibsen the typical old maid 
and denounces him as the creator of the " Eman- 
cipated Woman." Yes, he does insult Germany 
and the Germans, but no worse than in earlier 
books; and certainly not so effectively as did 
Goethe, Heine, and Schopenhauer. In calling 
the Germans the " Chinese of Europe" he but 
repeated the words of Goncourt in Charles De- 
mailly. He speaks of Liszt as one "who sur- 
passes all musicians by the noble accents of his 
orchestration" (vague phrase); and depreciates 
Schumann's "Manfred."' He, Nietzsche, had 
composed a counter overture which Von Bulow 
declared extraordinary. True, Von Bulow did 
call it something of the sort, with the advice to 
throw it into the dust-bin as being an insult to 
good music. He analyses his recent readings of 
Baudelaire — whose diary touched him deeply — of 
Stendhal, Bourget, Maupassant, Anatole France, 
and others. Best of all, he minutely analyses 
the mental processes of his books from The 
Birth of Tragedy to The Wagner Case. He 
declares Zarathustra a dithyramb of solitude and 
purity, and proudly boasts that the Superman 
builds his nest in the trees of the future. 

What a master of invective ! He often descends 
to the street in his tongue-lashing, as, for instance, 
when he groups "shopkeepers, Christians, cows, 
women, Englishmen, and other democrats." Wo- 
man is always the enemy. The only way to tame 
her is to make her a mother. As for female suf- 

266 



PHASES OF NIETZSCHE 

frage, he sets it down to psychological disorders. 
He is a nuance, and is the first German to under- 
stand women! Alas! And not the last man who 
will repeat this speech surely hailing from the 
Stone Age. He seems rather proud of his double 
personality, and hints at a third. Oddly enough, 
Nietzsche asked that his Ecce Homo (the title 
proves his constant preoccupation with Chris- 
tianity) be translated into French by Strindberg, 
the Swedish poet and the first dramatist to incor- 
porate into his plays the Nietzschian philosophy, or 
what he conceived to be such. (Daniel Lesueur has 
written of the various adaptations for gorillas of a 
teaching that really demands from man the ut- 
most that is in him.) Nietzsche was a hater of 
Christianity; above all of Christian morals, but 
he was a brave and honest fighter. He raged at 
George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, and Carlyle for 
their half-heartedness. To give up the belief in 
Christ and His mission meant for Nietzsche to 
drop the moral system, to transvalue old moral 
values. This, he truthfully asserted, George Eliot 
and Spencer had not the courage to do. He did not 
skulk behind such masks as the Higher Criticism, 
Modernism, or quacksalver Christian socialism. 
Compromise was abhorrent to him. His Super- 
man, with its echoes of Wagner's Siegfried, Ibsen's 
Brand, Stendhal's wicked heroes, the Renaissance 
Borgias, the second Faust of Goethe, and not a 
little of Hamlet, is a monster of perfection that may 
some day become a demigod for a new religion— 
and no worse than contemporary mud-gods manu- 
267 



EGOISTS 

factured daily. Nietzsche's particular virtue, even 
for the orthodox, is that though he assails their 
faith he also puts to rout with the fiery blasts of 
his rhetoric all the belly-gods, the false-culture 
gods, the gods who "heal," and other "ghosts" — 
as Max Stirner calls them. But to every genera- 
tion its truths (or lies). 

A recently published anecdote of Ibsen quotes 
a statement of his apropos of Brand. "The whole 
drama is only meant as irony. For the man who 
wants all or nothing is certainly crazy. " Well, 
Friedrich Nietzsche was such a man. No half- 
way parleyings. Fight the Bogey. Don't go 
around. He went more serenely than did Brand 
to his ice cathedral on the heights. His prayer 
uttered years before came true: "Give me, ye 
gods, give me madness! Madness to make me 
believe at last in myself." 

Nietzsche is the most dynamically emotional 
writer of his times. He sums up an epoch. He 
is the expiring voice of the old nineteenth-century 
romanticism in philosophy. His message to un- 
born generations we may easily leave to those 
unborn, and enjoy the wit, the profound criticisms 
of life, the bewildering gamut of his ideas; above 
all, pity the tragic blotting out of such a vivid 
intellectual life. 



268 



VIII 

MYSTICS 

i 

ERNEST HELLO 

It occurred in the beautiful gardens of the 
Paris exposition during that summer of 1867 
when Glory and France were synonymous ex- 
pressions. To the music, cynical and volup- 
tuous, of Offenbach and Strauss the world enjoyed 
itself, applauding equally Renan's latest book 
and Theresa's vulgarity; amused by Ponson de 
TerraiPs fatuous indecencies and speaking of 
Proudhon in the same breath. Bismarck and 
his Prussians seemed far away. Babel or Pom- 
peii? The tower of the Second Empire reached 
to the clouds; below, the people danced on the 
edge of the crater. A time for prophets and their 
lamentations. Jeremiah walked in the gardens. 
He was a terrible man, with sombre fatidical 
gaze, eyes in which were the smothered fires of 
hatred. His thin hair waved in the wind. He 
said to his friends: "I come from the Tuileries 
Palace; it is not yet consumed; the Barbarians 
delay their coming. What is Attila doing ?" 
He passed. "A madman!" exclaimed a com- 

269 



EGOISTS 

panion to Henri Lasserre. "Not in the least," 
replied that writer. "He is Ernest Hello." 
After reading this episode as related by Hello's 
friend and editor, the disquieting figure is evoked 
of that son of Hanan, who prowled through the 
streets of the holy city in the year a.d. 62 cry- 
ing aloud: "Woe, woe upon Jerusalem !" The 
prophecy of Hello was realized in a few years. 
Attila came and Attila went, and after his de- 
parture the polemical writer, who could be both 
a spouting volcano and a subtle doctor of the- 
ology, wrote his masterpiece, L'Homme, a re- 
markable book, a seed-bearing book. 

Why is there so little known of Ernest Hello? 
He was born 1828, died 1885, and was a volumi- 
nous author, who wrote much for the Univers and 
other periodicals and passed away as he had lived, 
fighting in harness for the truths of his religion. 
Possibly the less sensitive texture of Louis Veu- 
illot's mind and character threw the talents of 
Hello into shadow; perhaps his avowed hatred of 
mediocrity, his Old Testament power of vitupera- 
tion, and his apocalyptic style militated against 
his acceptance by the majority of Roman Catholic 
readers. Notwithstanding his gifts as a writer 
and thinker, Hello was never popular, and it is 
only a few years ago that his works began to be 
republished. Let us hasten to add that they are 
rich in suggestion for lovers of apologetic or 
hortatory literature. 

It was Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont 
who sent me to the amazing Hello. In A Rebours 
270 



MYSTICS 

Huysmans discusses him with Leon Bloy, Bar- 
bey d'Aurevilly, and Ozanam. " Hello is a cun- 
ning engineer of the soul, a skilful watchmaker 
of the brain, delighting to examine the mechan- 
ism of a passion and to explain the play of a 
wheel work." United to his power of analysis 
there is the fanaticism of a Biblical prophet and 
the tortured ingenuity of a master of style. A 
little John of Patmos, one who, complex and 
precious, is a sort of epileptic mystic — vindictive, 
proud, a despiser of the commonplace. All these 
things was Hello to Huysmans, who did not seem 
to relish him very much. De Gourmont described 
him as one who believed with genius. A believ- 
ing genius he was, Ernest Hello, and his genius, 
his dynamic faith — apart from any consideration 
of his qualities as a prose artist or his extraor- 
dinary powers of analysis. Without his faith, 
which was, one is tempted to add, his thematic 
material, he might have been a huge force vainly 
flapping his wings in the void, or, as Lasserre 
puts it, he was impatient with God because of His 
infinite patience. He longed to see Him strike 
dumb the enemies of His revealed word. He 
lived in a continuous thunder-storm of the spirit. 
He was a mystic, yet a warrior on the fighting 
line of the church militant. 

Joachim of Flora has written : " The true ascetic 
counts nothing his own save his harp." Hello, 
less subjective than Newman, less lyric though a 
"son of thunder," counted but the harp of his 
faith. All else he cast away. And this faith 
271 



EGOISTS 

was published to the heathen with the hot rhet- 
oric of a propagandist. The nations must be 
aroused from their slumber. He whirls his 
readers off their feet by the torrential flow of 
his argument. He never winds calmly into his 
subject, but smites vehemently the opening bars 
of his hardy discourse. He writes pure, un- 
troubled prose at times, the line, if agitated, un- 
broken, the balance of sound and sense perfect. 
But too often he employs a staccato, declamatory, 
tropical, inflated style which recalls Victor Hugo 
at his worst; the short sentence; the single para- 
graph; the vicious abuse of antithesis; if it were 
not for the subject-matter whole pages might mas- 
querade as the explosive mannerisms of Hugo. 
" Christianity is naturally impossible. However, 
it exists. Therefore it is supernatural !" This 
is Hello logic. Or, speaking of St. Joseph of 
Cupertino: "If he had not existed, no one could 
have invented him," which is a very witty in- 
version of Voltaire's celebrated mot. God-intoxi- 
cated as were St. Francis of Assisi or Pere 
Ratisbonne, Hello was not; when absent from 
the tripod of vaticination he was a meek, loving 
man; then the walls of his Tunis eburnea echoed 
the inevitable: Ora pro nobis! Even when the 
soul seems empty, it may, like a hollow shell, 
murmur of eternity. Hello's faith was in the 
fourth spiritual dimension. It demanded the 
affirmation of his virile intellect and the concur- 
rence of his overarching emotional temperament. 
In the black-and-white sketch by Vallotton he 
272 



MYSTICS 

resembles both Remenyi, the Hungarian violin 
virtuoso, and Louise Michel, the anarchist. The 
brow is vast, the expression exalted, the mouth 
belligerent, disputatious, and the chin slightly 
receding. One would say a man of violent pas- 
sions, in equilibrium unsteady, a skirter of abysses, 
a good hater — did he not once propose a History 
of Hatred ? Yet how submissive he was to papal 
decrees; many of his books contain instead of a 
preface his act of submission to Catholic dogma. 
More so than Huysmans was he a mediaeval man. 
For him modern science did not exist. The 
Angelic Doctor will outlive Darwin, he cried, and 
the powers and principalities of darkness are as 
active in these days as in the age when the saints 
of the desert warred with the demons of 
doubt and concupiscence. "To wring from 
man's tongue the denial of his existence is proof 
of Satan's greatest power," was a sentiment of 
Pere Ravignan to which Hello would have heartily 
subscribed. He detested Renan — Renan, voila 
Vennemi! Jeremy Taylor's vision of hell as an 
abode crowded with a million dead dogs would 
not be too severe a punishment for that silken 
sophist, whose writings are the veriest flotsam and 
jetsam of a disordered spiritual life. Hello has 
written eloquent pages about Hugo, whose poetry 
he admired, whose ideas he combated. Napoleon 
was a genius, but a foe of God. 

Shakespeare for him vacillated between ob- 
scenity and melancholy; Hamlet was a character 
hardly sounded by Hello; doubt was a psycho- 

273 



EGOISTS 

logical impossibility to one of his faith. He was 
convinced that the John of the Apocalyptic books 
was not John the Presbyter, nor any one of the 
five Johns of the Johannic writings, but John the 
Apostle. He has often the colour of Bossuet's 
moral indignation. A master of theological 
odium, his favourite denunciation was "Horma, 
Anathema, Anatheme, Amen!" His favourite 
symbol of confusion is Babel — Paris. He loved, 
among many saints, Denys the Areopagite; he 
extolled the study of St. Thomas Aquinas. To 
the unhappy Abbe de Lamenais's Paroles d'un 
Croyant (1834), he opposed his own Paroles de 
Dieu. He could have, phrase for phrase, book 
for book, retorted with tenfold interest to Nietz- 
sche's vilification of Christianity. Society will 
again become a theocracy, else pay the penalty 
in anarchy. One moment beating his breast, he 
cries aloud: "Maranatha! Maranatha! Our Lord 
is at hand!" The next we find him with the icy 
contemptuousness of a mystic quoting from the 
Admirable Ruysbroeck (a thirteenth-century 
mystic whom he had translated, whose writings 
influenced Huysmans, and at one period of his 
development, Maurice Maeterlinck) these brave 
words: "Needs must I rejoice beyond the age, 
though the world has horror of my joy, and its 
grossness cannot understand what I say." Not- 
withstanding this aloofness, there are some who 
after reading Ernest Hello's Man may agree with 
Havelock Ellis: " Hello is the real psychologist 
of the century, not Stendhal." 

274 



MYSTICS 

It is indeed a work of penetrating criticism 
and clairvoyance, this study of man, of life. Read 
his analysis of the Miser and you will recall 
Plautus or Moliere. He has something of Saint- 
Simon's power in presenting a finished portrait 
and La Bruyere's cameo concision. He is re- 
actionary in all that concerns modern aesthetics 
or the natural sciences. There is but one science, 
the knowledge of God. Avoiding the devious 
webs of metaphysics, he sets before us his ideas 
with a crystal clarity. Despite its religious bias, 
L'Homme may be recommended as a book for 
mundane minds. Nor is Le Siecle to be missed. 
Those views of the world, of men and women, 
are written- by a shrewd observer and a profound 
thinker. Philosophie et Atheisme is just what 
its title foretells — a battering-ram of dialectic. 
The scholastic learning of Hello is enormous. 
He had at his beck the Bible, the patristic writers, 
the schoolmen, and all the moderns from De 
Maistre to Father Faber. He execrated Modern- 
ism. Physionomies de Saintes, Angelo de Foligno, 
and half a dozen other volumes prove how versed 
he was in Holy Writ. "The Scriptures are an 
abysm," he declared. He wrote short stories, 
Contes extraordinaires, which display excellent 
workmanship, no little fantasy, yet are rather 
slow reading. In literature Hello was a belated 
romantic, a Don Quixote of the ideal who charged 
ferociously the windmills of indifference. 

In 1 88 1 he was a collaborator with an American 
religious publication called Propagateur Catho- 

275 



EGOISTS 

lique (I give the French title because I do not 
know whether it was published here or in Can- 
ada). His contributions were incorporated later 
in his Words of God. I confess to knowing little 
of Hello but his works, the Life by Lasserre being 
out of print. Impressive as is his genius, it is 
often repellent, because love of his fellow-man is 
not a dominant part of it. The central flame 
burns brightly, fiercely; the tiny taper of charity 
is often missing. With his beloved Ruysbroeck 
(Rusbrock, he names him) he seems to be mutter- 
ing too often a disdainful adieu to his gross and 
ignorant brethren as if abandoning them to their 
lies and ruin. However, his translation of this 
same Ruysbroeck is a genuine accession to con- 
templative literature. And perhaps, if one too 
hastily criticises the almost elemental faith of Hello 
and its rude assaults of the portals of pride, lux- 
ury, and worldliness, perhaps the old wisdom may 
cruelly rebound upon his detractors: " Dixit in- 
sipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus." 



276 



MYSTICS 

II 

"MAD, NAKED BLAKE " 

I 

Perhaps the best criticism ever uttered offhand 
about the art of William Blake was Rodin's, who, 
when shown some facsimiles of Blake's drawings 
by brilliant Arthur Symons with the explanation 
that Blake " used literally to see those figures, they 
are not mere inventions," replied: " Yes. He saw 
them once; he should have seen them three or four 
times." And this acute summing up of Blake's 
gravest defect is further strengthened by a remark 
made by one of his most sympathetic commen- 
tators, Laurence Binyon. Blake once said : " The 
lavish praise I have received from all quarters for 
invention and drawing has generally been accom- 
panied by this : ' He can conceive, but he cannot 
execute.' This absurd assertion has done and 
may still do me the greatest mischief." Now 
comments Mr. Binyon: "In spite of the artist's 
protest this continues to be the current criticism 
on Blake's work; and yet the truth lies rather on 
the other side. It is not so much in his execution 
as in the failure to mature his conceptions that 
his defect is to be found." Again: "His tempera- 
ment unfitted him for success in carrying his work 
further; his want was not lack of skill, but lack 
of patience." If this sounds paradoxical we find 

277 



EGOISTS 

Symons admitting that Rodin had hit the nail on 
the head. " There, it seems to me, is the funda- 
mental truth about the art of Blake; it is a 
record of vision which has not been thoroughly 
mastered even as vision." 

Notwithstanding the neglect to which Blake 
was subjected during his lifetime and the mis- 
understanding ever since his death of his extraor- 
dinary and imaginative designs, poetry, and 
vaticinations, it is disquieting to see how books 
about Blake are beginning to pile up. He may 
even prove as popular as Ibsen. A certain form 
of genius serves as a starting-point for critical 
performances. Blake is the most admirable ex- 
ample, though Whitman and Browning are in 
the same class. Called cryptic by their own, 
they are too well understood by a later genera- 
tion. Wagner once swam in the consciousness of 
the elect; and he was understood. Baudelaire 
understood him, so Liszt. Wagner to-day is the 
property of the man in the street, who whistles 
him, and Ibsen is already painfully yielding up 
his precious secrets to relentless " expounding" 
torturers. As for Maeterlinck, he is become a 
mere byword in literary clubs, where they discuss 
his Bee in company with the latest Shaw epigram. 
"Even caviare, it seems, may become a little 
flyblown," exclaims Mr. Dowden. Everything is 
being explained. Oh, happy age! Who once 
wrote: " A hundred fanatics are found to a theo- 
logical or metaphysical statement, but not one for 
a geometric problem" ? 

278 



MYSTICS 

Yet we may be too rash. Blake's prophetic 
books are still cloudy nightmares, for all but the 
elect, and not Swinburne, Gilchrist, Tatham, 
Richard Garnett, Ellis, Binyon, Yeats, Symons, 
Graham Robertson, Alfred Story, Maclagan 
and Russell, Elizabeth Luther Cary and the 
others — for there are others and there will be 
others — can wring from these fragments more 
than an occasional meaning or music. But in 
ten years he may be the pontiff of a new dispensa- 
tion. Symons has been wise in the handling 
of his material. After a general and compre- 
hensive study of Blake he brings forward some 
new records from contemporary sources — ex- 
tracts from the diary, letters and reminiscences of 
Henry Crabb Robinson; from A Father's Memoir 
of His Child, by Benjamin Heath Malkin; from 
Lady Charlotte Bury's Diary (1820); Blake's 
horoscope, obituary notice, extract from Varley's 
Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828); a biographical 
sketch of Blake by J. T. Smith (1828), and Allan 
Cunningham's life of Blake (1830). In a w T ord, 
for those who cannot spare the time to investi- 
gate the various and sundry Blakian exegetics, 
Symons's book is the best because most condensed. 
It is the Blake question summed up by a supple 
hand and a sympathetic spirit. It is inscribed 
to Auguste Rodin in the following happy and sig- 
nificant phrase: "To Auguste Rodin, whose 
work is the marriage of heaven and hell" 



279 



EGOISTS 



II 



William Blake must have been the happiest 
man that ever lived; not the doubtful happiness of 
a fool's paradise, but a sharply defined ecstasy 
that was his companion from his earliest years 
to his very death-bed; that bed on which he passed 
away " singing of the things he saw in heaven," 
to the tune of his own improvised strange music. 
He seems to have been the solitary man in art 
history who really fulfilled Walter Pater's test 
of success in life: "To burn always with this hard 
gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy." Blake 
easily maintained it. His face shone with it. 
Withal he was outwardly sane in matters of mun- 
dane conduct, sensitive and quick to resent any 
personal affront, and by no means one of those 
awful prophets going about proclaiming their self- 
imposed mission. An amiable man, quick to 
fly into and out of a passion, a gentleman ex- 
quisite in manners, he impressed those who met 
him as an unqualified genius. Charles Lamb 
has told us of him; so have others. I possess an 
engraving of his head after LinnelPs miniature, 
and while his Irish paternity has never been thor- 
oughly established — Yeats calls him an Irish- 
man — there can be little doubt of his Celtic 
origin. His is the head of a poet, a patriot, a 
priest. The brow is lofty and wide, the hair 
flamelike in its upcurling. The eyes are marvel- 
lous — true windows of a soul vividly aware of 
280 



MYSTICS 

its pricelessness; the mystic eye and the eye of 
the prophet about to thunder upon the perverse 
heads of his times. The full lips and massive 
chin make up the ensemble of a singularly noble, 
inspired, and well-balanced head. Symmetry is 
its keynote. A God-kindled face. One looks 
in vain for any indication of the madman — Blake 
was called mad during his lifetime, and ever since 
he has been considered mad by the world. Yet 
he was never mad as were John Martin and Wiertz 
the Belgian, or as often seems Odilon Redon, who 
has been called — heaven knows why ! — the 
"French Blake." The poet Cowper said to Blake: 
"Oh, that I were insane always. . . . Can you 
not make me truly insane ? . . . You retain health 
and yet are as mad as any of us — over us all — 
mad as a refuge from unbelief — from Bacon, 
Newton, and Locke." The arid atheism of his 
century was doubtless a contributory cause to the 
exasperation of Blake's nerves. He believed 
himself a Christian despite his heterodox sayings, 
and his belief is literal and profound. A true 
Citizen of Eternity, as Yeats named him, and with 
all his lack of academic training, what a giant he 
was among the Fuselis, Bartolozzis, Stothards, 
Schiavonettis, and the other successful medioc- 
rities. 

His life was spent in ignoble surroundings, an 
almost anonymous life, though a happy one be- 
cause of its illuminating purpose and flashes of 
golden fire. Blake was born in London (1757) 
and died in London (1827). He was the son of 

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EGOISTS 

a hosier, whose real name was not O'Neill, as 
some have maintained. The boy, at the age of 
fourteen, was apprenticed to Ryland the engraver, 
but the sight of his master's face caused him to 
shudder and he refused to work under him, giving 
as a reason that Ryland would be hanged some 
day. And so he was, for counterfeiting. The 
abnormally sensitive little chap then went to the 
engraver Basire, with whom he remained a year. 
His precocity was noteworthy. In 1773 he put 
forth as a pretended copy of Michaelangelo a 
design which he called Joseph of Arimathea 
Among the Rocks of Albion. At that early age 
he had already begun to mix up Biblical charac- 
ters and events with the life about him. The Bible 
saturated his imagination; it was not a dead record 
for him, but a living, growing organism that over- 
lapped the spiritual England of his day. The 
grotesqueness of his titles, the mingling of the 
familiar with the exotic — the sublime and the 
absurd are seldom asunder in Blake — sacred 
with secular, were the results of his acquaintance 
with the Scriptures at a period when other boys 
were rolling hoops or flying kites. Blake could 
never have been a boy, in the ordinary sense; yet 
he was to the last day of his life a child in the 
naivete of his vision. "I am ever the new-born 
child," he might have said, as did Goethe to 
Herder. At the age of four he said God put his 
face in the window, and he ran screaming to his 
parents to bear witness to the happening. He 
had seen a tree bright with angels at Peckham 
282 



MYSTICS 

Rye, and his life long he held converse with the 
spirits of Moses, Homer, Socrates, Dante, Shake- 
speare, and Milton. He adored Michaelangelo, 
and Albrecht Dlirer and Swedenborg completed 
the conquest — perhaps the unsettlement — of his 
intellect. He hated Titian, Rubens, and Rem- 
brandt. They were sensualists, they did not 
in their art lay the emphasis upon drawing, and as 
we shall see presently, drawing was the chief factor 
for Blake, colour being a humble handmaiden. 

In 1782 Blake married for love Catharine 
Boucher, or Boutcher, of whom Mr. Swinburne 
has said that she " deserves remembrance as 
about the most perfect wife on record." She 
was uneducated, but learned to read and write, 
and later proved an inestimable helpmate for the 
struggling and unpractical Blake. She bound 
his books and coloured some of his illustrations. 
She bore long poverty uncomplainingly, one is 
tempted to say with enthusiasm. Once only she 
faltered. Blake had his own notions about cer- 
tain Old Testament customs, and he, it is said 
on the authority of a gossip, had proposed to add 
another wife to the poor little household. Mrs. 
Blake wept and the matter was dropped. Other 
gossip avers that the Adamite in Blake mani- 
fested itself in a not infrequent desire to cast aside 
garments and to sit in paradisiacal innocence. 
Whether these stories were the invention of ma- 
licious associates or were true, one thing is cer- 
tain: Blake was capable of anything for which 
he could find a Biblical precedent. In the matter 
283 



EGOISTS 

of the unconventional he was the Urvater of Eng- 
lish rebels. Shelley, Byron, Swinburne were timid 
amateurs compared to this man, who with a terrific 
energy translated his thoughts into art. He was 
not the idle dreamer of an empty day nor a moon- 
ing mystic. His energy was electric. It sounds 
a clarion note in his verse and prose, it reveals 
itself in the fiery swirlings of his line, a line swift 
and personal. He has been named by some one 
a heretic in the Church of Swedenborg; but like 
a latter-day rebel — Nietzsche, who renounced 
Schopenhauer — Blake soon renounced Sweden- 
borg. But Michelangelo remained a deity for 
him, and in his designs the influence of Angelo 
is paramount. 

Blake might be called an English Primitive. 
He stems from the Florentines, but a la gauche. 
The bar sinister on his artistic coat of arms is the 
lack of fundamental training. He had a Gothic 
imagination, but his dreams lack architectonics. 
Goethe, too, had dreams, and we are the richer 
by Faust. And no doubt there are in his works 
phrases that Nietzsche has seemed to repeat. 
It is the fashion just now to trace every idea 
of Nietzsche to some one else. The truth 
is that the language of rebellion through the 
ages is the same. The mere gesture of revolt, as 
typified in the uplifted threatening arm of a Cain, 
a Prometheus, a Julian the Apostate, is no more 
conventional than the phraseology of the heretic. 
How many of them have written " inspired" 
bibles, from Mahomet to Zarathustra. Blake, his 
284 



MYSTICS 

tumultuous imagination afire — remember that the 
artist doubled the poet in his amazing and versa- 
tile soul — poured forth for years his " sacred " 
books, his prophecies, his denouncements of his 
fellow-man. It was all sincere righteous indig- 
nation; but the method of his speech is obscure; 
the Mormon books of revelation are miracles of 
clarity in comparison. Let us leave these sin- 
gular prophecies of Blake to the mystics. One 
thing is sure — he has affected many poets and 
thinkers. There are things in The Marriage of 
Heaven and Hell that Shaw might have said had 
not Blake forestalled him. Such is the cruelty of 
genius. 

Symons makes apt comparison between Blake 
and Nietzsche: " There is nothing in good and 
evil, the virtues and vices . . . vices in the natural 
world are the highest sublimities in the spiritual 
world." This might have appeared over Nietz- 
sche's signature in Beyond Good and Evil. And 
the following in his marginalia to Reynolds — Sir 
Joshua always professed a high regard for the 
genius of Blake. "The Enquiry in England is 
not whether a man has Talents and Genius, but 
whether he is Passive and Polite and a Virtuous 
Ass." The vocabulary of rebellion is the same. 
Still more bitter is his speech about holiness: 
"The fool shall not enter into the kingdom of 
heaven, let him be ever so pious." Blake glori- 
fied passion, which for him was the highest form 
of human energy. His tragic scrolls, emotional 
arabesques, are testimony to his high and subtle 

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EGOISTS 

temperament. The intellect he worshipped. Of 
pride we cannot have too much ! As a lyric poet 
it is too late in the day to reiterate that he is a 
peer in the "holy church of English literature." 
The Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience 
have given him a place in the anthologies and 
made him known to readers who have never heard 
of him as a pictorial genius. "Tiger, tiger, burn- 
ing bright, In the forests of the night," is recited 
by sweet school-misses and pondered for its phil- 
osophy by their masters. And has Keats ever 
fashioned a lovelier image than: "Let thy west 
wind sleep on the lake; spread silence with thy 
glimmering eyes and wash the dtisk with silver" ? 
Whatever he may not be, William Blake is a great 



III 



William Butler Yeats in his Ideas of Good and 
Evil has said some notable things about Blake. 
He calls him a realist of the imagination and first 
pointed out the analogy between Blake and 
Nietzsche. "When one reads Blake it is as 
though the spray of an inexhaustible fountain 
of beauty was blown into our faces." And "he 
was a symbolist who had to invent his symbols." 
Well, what great artist does not? Wagner did; 
also Ibsen and Maeterlinck. Blake was much 
troubled over the imagination. It was the " spirit" 
for him in this "vegetable universe," the Holy 
Ghost. All art that sets forth with any fulness 
the outward vesture of things is prompted by the 
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MYSTICS 

" rotten rags of memory." That is why he loathed 
Rubens, why he seemingly slurs the forms of men 
and things in his eagerness to portray the essen- 
tial. Needless to add, the essential for him was 
the soul. He believed in goading the imagination 
to vision — though not with opium — and we 
are led through a dream-world of his ow T n fashion- 
ing, one in which his creatures bear little corre- 
spondence to earthly types. His illustrations to 
the Book of Job, to Dante, to Young's Night 
Thoughts bear witness to the intensity of his vision, 
though flesh and blood halts betimes in follow- 
ing these vast decorative whirls of flame bearing 
myriad souls in blasts that traverse the very firma- 
ment. The "divine awkwardness" of his Adam 
and Eve and the "Ancient of Days" recall some- 
thing that might be a marionette and yet an angelic 
being. To Blake they were angels; of that there 
can be no doubt; but we of less fervent imagina- 
tion may ask as did Hotspur of Glendower, who 
had boasted that he could "call spirits from the 
vasty deep." "Why, so can I, or so can any man. 
But will they come when you do call for them?" 
quoth the gallant Percy. We are, the majority 
of us, as unimaginative as Hotspur. Blake sum- 
moned his spirits; to him they appeared; to 
quote his own magnificent utterance, "The stars 
threw down their spears, and watered heaven with 
their tears"; but we, alas! see neither stars nor 
spears nor tears, only eccentric draughtsmanship 
and bizarre designs. Yet, after Blake, Dore's 
Dante illustrations are commonplace; even Botti- 
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EGOISTS 

celli's seem ornamental. Such is the genius of the 
Englishman that on the thither side of his 
shadowy conceptions there shine intermittently 
pictures of a No Man's Land, testifying to a burn- 
ing fantasy hampered by human tools. He sug- 
gests the supernatural. "How do you know," 
he asks, "but every bird that cuts the airy way is 
an immense world of delight closed by your senses 
five?" Of him Ruskin has said: "In express- 
ing conditions of glaring and flickering light Blake 
is greater than Rembrandt." With Dante he 
went to the nethermost hell. His warring at- 
tributes tease and attract us. For the more 
human side we commend Blake's seventeen 
wood engravings to Thornton's Virgil. They are 
not so rich as Bewick's, but we must remember 
that it was Blake's first essay with knife and box- 
wood — he was really a practised copper engraver 
— and the effects he produced are wonderful. 
What could be more powerful in such a tiny space 
than the moon eclipse and the black forest illus- 
trating the lines, "Or when the moon, by wizard 
charm'd, foreshows Bloodstained in foul eclipse, 
impending woes!" And the dim sunsets, the 
low, friendly sky in the other plates! 

Blake's gospel of art may be given in his own 
words: "The great and golden rule of art. as of 
life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp and wiry 
the boundary line the more perfect the work of 
art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is 
the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and 
bungling." He abominated the nacreous ilesh 

288 



MYSTICS 

tones of Titian, Correggio, or Rubens. Reflected 
lights are sinful. The silhouette betrays the soul 
of the master. Swinburne in several eloquent 
pages has instituted a comparison between Walt 
Whitman and William Blake. (In the first edi- 
tion of " William Blake: A Critical Essay," 1868.) 
Both men were radicals. "The words of either 
strike deep and run wide and soar high." What 
would have happened to Blake if he had gone to 
Italy and studied the works of the masters — for 
he was truly ignorant of an entire hemisphere of 
art? Turner has made us see his dreams of a 
gorgeous world; Blake, as through a scarce 
opened door, gives us a breathless glimpse of a 
supernal territory, whether heaven or hell, or 
both, we dare not aver. Italy might have calmed 
him, tamed him, banished his arrogance — as it 
did Goethe's. Suppose that Walt Whitman had 
written poems instead of magical and haunting 
headlines. And if Browning had made clear the 
devious ways of Sordello — what then? "What 
porridge had John Keats?" We should have 
missed the sharp savour of the real Blake, the real 
Whitman, the real Browning. And what a num- 
ber of interesting critical books would have re- 
mained unwritten. "Oh, never star was lost here 
but it arose afar." What Coleridge wrote of his 
son Hartley might serve for Blake: "Exquisitely 
wild, an utter visionary, like the moon among thin 
clouds, he moves in a circle of his own making. 
He alone is a light of his own. Of all human 
beings I never saw one so utterly naked of self." 
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EGOISTS 

Naked of self! William Blake, unselfish egoist, 
stands before us in three words. 



Ill 
FRANCIS POICTEVIN 

There is a memorable passage in A Rebours, 
the transcription of which, by Mr. George Moore, 
may be helpful in understanding the work of that 
rare literary artist, Francis Poictevin. " The poem 
in prose," wrote Huysmans, "handled by an 
alchemist of genius, should contain the quin- 
tessence, the entire strength of the novel, the long 
analysis and the superfluous description of which 
it suppresses ... the adjective placed in such 
an ingenious and definite way that it could not 
be legally dispossessed of its place, that the 
reader would dream for whole weeks together 
over its meaning, at once precise and multiple; 
affirm the present, reconstruct the past, divine 
the future of the souls revealed by the light of the 
unique epithet. The novel thus understood, thus 
condensed into one or two pages, would be a com- 
munion of thought between a magical writer and 
an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration by con- 
sent between ten superior persons scattered 
through the universe, a delectation offered to the 
most refined and accessible only to them." 

This aristocratic theory of art was long ago 
propounded by Poe in regard to the short poem. 
Huysmans transposed the idea to the key of fiction 

290 



MYSTICS 

while describing the essential prose of Mallarme; 
but some years before the author of A Rebours 
wrote his ideal book on decadence a modest 
young Frenchman had put into practice the de- 
lightfully impracticable theories of the prose 
poem. This writer was Francis Poictevin (born 
at Paris, 1854). Many there were, beginning 
with Edgar Poe and Louis Bertrand, who had 
essayed the form, at its best extremely difficult, 
at its worst too tempting to facile conquests: 
Baudelaire, Huysmans in his Le Drageoir aux 
Epices; Daudet, De Banville, Villiers de LTsle 
Adam, Maurice de Guerin, and how many others! 
During the decade of the eighties the world of 
literature seemed to be fabricating poems in prose. 
Pale youths upon whose brows descended aure- 
oles at twilight, sought fame in this ivory minia- 
ture carving addressed to the "ten superior per- 
sons" very much scattered over the globe. But 
like most peptonic products, the brain as does 
the stomach, finally refuses to accept as nourish- 
ment artificial concoctions too heavily flavoured 
with midnight oil. The world, which is gross, 
prefers its literature by the gross, and though it 
has been said that all the great exterior novels 
have been written, the majority of readers con- 
tinue to read long-winded stories dealing with 
manners and, of course, the eternal conquest of 
an uninteresting female by a med'ocre male. 
Aiming at instantaneity of pictorial and musical 
effect — as a picture become lyrical — the poets 
who fashioned their prose into artistic rhythms 
291 



EGOISTS 

and colours and tones ended by exhausting the 
patience of a public rapidly losing its faculty of 
attention. 

Possibly these things may account for the neg- 
lect of a writer and thinker of such delicacy and 
originality as Poictevin, but he was always caviare 
even to the consumers of literary caviar. But 
he had a small audience in Paris, and after his 
first book appeared — one hesitates to call it a 
novel — Daudet saluted it with the praise that 
Sainte-Beuve — the Sainte-Beuve of Volupte and 
Port-Royal — would have been delighted with La 
Robe du Moine. Here is a list of Poictevin' s 
works and the years of their publication until 
1894. Please note their significant and extraor- 
dinary names: La Robe du Moine, 1882; 
Ludine, 1883; Songes, 1884; Petitan, 1885; 
Seuls, 1886; Paysages et Nouveaux Songes, 1888; 
Derniers Songes, 1888; Double, 1889; Presque, 
1891 ; Heures, 1892 ; Tout Bas, 1893 ; Ombres, 1894. 

A collective title for them might be Nuances; 
Poictevin searches the last nuance of sensations 
and ideas. He is a remote pupil of Gon- 
court, and superior to his master in his power 
of recording the impalpable. (Compare any 
of his books with the Madame Gervaisais of 
Goncourt; the latter is mysticism very much in 
the concrete.) At the same time he recalls Amiel, 
Maurice de Guerin, Walter Pater, and Coventry 
Patmore. A mystical pantheist in his worship 
of nature, he is a mystic in his adoration of God. 
This intensity of vision in the case of Poictevin 

292 



MYSTICS 

did not lead to the depravities, exquisite and 
morose, of Baudelaire, Huysmans, and the bril- 
liant outrageous Barbey d'Aurevilly. With his 
soul of ermine Poictevin is characterised by 
De Gourmont as the inventor of the mysticism 
of style. Once he saluted Edmond de Gon- 
court as the Velasquez of the French language, 
and that master, not to be outdone in politeness, 
told Poictevin that his prose could boast its 
" victories over the invisible." If by this Gon- 
court meant making the invisible visible, render- 
ing in prose of crepuscular subtlety moods recon- 
dite, then it was not an exaggerated compliment. 
In such spiritual performances Poictevin re- 
sembles Lafcadio Hearn in his airiest gossamer- 
webbed phrases. A true, not a professional 
symbolist, the French prosateur sounds Debussy 
twilight harmonies. His speech at times glistens 
with the hues of a dragon-fly zigzagging in the 
sunshine. In the tenuous exaltation of his 
thought he evokes the ineffable deity, circled by 
faint glory. To compass his picture he does 
not hesitate to break the classic mould of French 
syntax while using all manners of strange-fangled 
vocables to attain effects that remind one of the 
clear-obscure of Rembrandt. Indeed, a mystic 
style is his, beside which most writers seem heavy- 
handed and obvious. 

Original in his form, in the bizarre architecture 
of his paragraphs, pages, chapters, he abolishes 
the old endings, cadences, chapter headings. 
Nor, except at the beginning of his career, does 

293 



EGOISTS 

he portray a definite hero or heroine. Even names 
are avoided. "He" or "she" suffices to indicate 
the sex. Action there is little. Story he has 
none to tell; by contrast Henry James is epical. 
Exteriority does not interest Poictevin, who is 
nevertheless a landscape painter; intimate and 
charming. His young man and young woman 
visit Mentone, the Pyrenees, Brittany, along the 
Rhine — a favourite resort — Holland, Luchon, 
Montreux, and Switzerland, generally. His pal- 
ette is marvellously complicated. We should call 
him an impressionist but that the phrase is be- 
come banal. Poictevin deals in subtle grays. 
He often writes gris-iris. His portraits swim in 
a mysterious atmosphere as do Eugene Carriere's. 
His fluid, undulating prose records landscapes in 
the manner of Theocritus. 

The tiny repercussions of the spirit that is re- 
acted upon by life are Whistlerian notations in 
the gamut of this artist's instrument. Evocation, 
not description; evocation, not narration; al- 
ways evocation, yet there is a harmonious en- 
semble; he returns to his theme after capriciously 
circling about it as does a Hungarian gypsy when 
improvising upon the heart-strings of his auditors. 
Verlaine once addressed a poem to Poictevin the 
first line of which runs: "Toujours mecontent de 
son oeuvre." Maurice Barres evidently had read 
Seuls before he wrote Le Jardin de Berenice 
(1891). The young woman in Poictevin's tale 
has the same feverish languors; her male com- 
panion, though not the egoist of Barres, is a very 

294 



MYSTICS 

modern person, slightly consumptive; one of 
whom it may be asked, in the words of Poictevin : 
"Is there anything sadder under the sun than a 
soul incapable of sadness?" In their room hang 
portraits of Baudelaire and the Cure d'Ars. Odder 
still is the monk, P. Martin. Martin is the name 
of the " adversary" in The Garden of Berenice. 
And the episode of the dog's death! Huysmans, 
too, must have admired Poictevin' s descriptions 
of the Griinewald Christ at Colmar, and of the 
portrait of the Young Florentine in the Stadel 
Museum at Frankfort. It would be instructive 
to compare the differing opinions of the two critics 
concerning this last-named picture. 

A mirror, Poictevin's soul reflects the moods of 
landscapes. Without dogmatism he could say 
with St. Anselm that he would rather go to hell 
sinless than be in heaven smudged by a single 
transgression. To his tender temperament even 
the reading of Pascal brought shadows of doubt. 
A persistent dreamer, the world for him is but the 
garment investing God. Flowers, stars, the wind 
that weeps in little corners, the placid bosom of 
lonely lakes, far-away mountains and their mystic 
silhouettes, the Rhine and its many curvings, 
the clamour of cities and the joy of the green grass, 
are his themes. Life with its frantic gestures is 
quite inutile. Let it be avoided. You turn after 
reading Poictevin to the Minoration of Emile 
Hennequin: "Let all that is be no more. Let 
glances fade and the vivacity of gestures fall. 
Let us be humble, soft, and slow. Let us love 

2 95 



EGOISTS 

without passion, and let us exchange weary 
caresses." Or hear the tragic cry of Ephraim 
Mikhael: " Ah! to see behind me no longer, on the 
lake of Eternity, the implacable wake of Time." 

"Poictevin's men and women," once wrote 
Aline Gorren in a memorable study of French 
symbolism, "are subordinate to these wider 
curves of wave and sky; they come and go, emerg- 
ing from their setting briefly and fading into it 
again; they have no personality apart from it; 
and amid the world symbols of the heavens in 
marshalled movements and the thousand reeded 
winds, they in their human symbols are allowed 
to seem, as they are, proportionately small. They 
are possessed as are clouds, waters, trees, but no 
more than clouds, waters, trees, of a baffling sig- 
nificance, forever a riddle to itself. They have 
bowed attitudes; the weight of the mystery they 
carry on their shoulders." 

The humanity that secretly evaporates when 
the prose poet notes the attrition of two souls is 
shed upon his landscapes with their sonorous 
silences. A picture of the life contemplative, of 
the adventures of timorous gentle souls in search 
of spiritual adventures, set before us in a style of 
sublimated preciosity by an orchestra of sensations 
that has been condensed to the string quartet, 
the dreams of Francis Poictevin — does he not 
speak of the human forehead as a dream dome? 
— are not the least consoling of his century. He 
is the white-robed acolyte among mystics of mod- 
ern literature. 

296 



MYSTICS 

IV 

THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS 

Religious conversion and its psychology have 
furnished the world's library with many volumes. 
Perfectly understood in the ages of faith, the sub- 
ject is for modern thinkers susceptible of realistic 
explanation. Only we pave the way now by a psy- 
chological course instead of the ancient doctrine 
of Grace Abounding. Nor do we confound the 
irresistible desire of certain temperaments to spill 
their innermost thoughts, with what is called con- 
version. There was Rousseau, who confessed 
things that the world would be better without 
having heard. He was not converted. Tolstoy, 
believing that primitive Christianity is almost lost 
to his fellow beings, preaches what he thinks is 
the real faith. Yet he was converted. He had 
been, he said, a terrible transgressor. The grace 
of God gave sight to his sin-saturated eyeballs. 
Is there the slightest analogy between his case 
and that of Cardinal Newman? John Henry 
Newman had led a spotless life before he left the 
Anglican fold. Nevertheless he was a convert. 
And Saint Augustine, the pattern of all self-con- 
fessors, the classic case, may be compared to John 
Bunyan or to Saint Paul! Professor William 
James, who with his admirable impartiality has 
scrutinized the psychological topsy-turvy we name 
conversion, has not missed the commonplace fact 

297 



EGOISTS 

that every man as to details varies, but at base the 
psychical machinery is controlled by the same 
motor impulses. A chacun son infini. 

Some natures reveal a mania for confession. 
Dostoievsky's men and women continually tell 
what they have thought, what crimes they have 
committed. It was an epileptic obsession with 
this unhappy Russian writer. Paul Verlaine 
sang blithely of his ghastly life, and Baudelaire 
did not spare himself. So it would seem that the 
inability of certain natures to keep their most 
precious secrets is also the keynote of religious 
confessions. But let us not muddle this with the 
sincerity or insincerity of the change. Leslie 
Stephen has said that it did not matter much 
whether Pascal was sincere, and instanced the 
Pascal wager (le pari de Pascal) as evidence of the 
great thinker's casuistry. It is better to believe 
and be on the safe side than be damned if you do 
not believe; for if there is no hereafter your be- 
lieving that there is will not matter one way or the 
other. This is the substance of Pascal's wager, 
and it must be admitted that the ardent upholder 
of Jansenism and the opponent of the Jesuits 
proved himself an excellent pupil of the latter 
when he framed his famous proposition. 

Among the converts who have become almost 
notorious in France during the last two decades 
are Ferdinand Brunetiere, Francois Coppee, Paul 
Verlaine, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. But it must 
not be forgotten that if the quartette trod the Road 
to Damascus they were all returning to their early 
298 



MYSTICS 

City of Faith. They had been baptized Roman 
Catholics. All four had strayed. And widely 
different reasons brought them back to their mother 
Church. We need not dwell now on the case of 
Villiers de ITsle Adam, as his was a deathbed re- 
pentance; nor with Paul Bourget, a Catholic 
born and on the side of his faith since the publi- 
cation of Cosmopolis. As for Maurice Barres, 
he may be a Mohammedan for all we care. He 
will always stand, spiritually, on his head. 

The stir in literary and religious circles over 
Huysmans's trilogy, En Route, La Cathedrale, 
and L'Oblat, must have influenced the succeed- 
ing generation of French writers. Of a sudden 
sad young rakes who spouted verse in the aesthetic 
taverns of the Left Bank fell to writing religious 
verse. Mary Queen of Heaven became their 
shibboleth. They invented new sins so that they 
might repent in a novel fashion. They lacked 
the delicious lyric gift of Verlaine and the tremen- 
dous enfolding moral earnestness of Huysmans 
to make themselves believed. One, however, 
has emerged from the rest, and his book, Du 
Diable a Dieu (From the Devil to God), has 
crossed the twenty-five thousand mark; perhaps 
it is further by this time. The author is an au- 
thentic poet, Adolphe Rette. For his confessions 
the lately deceased Francois Coppee wrote a dig- 
nified and sympathetic preface. Rette's place 
in contemporary poetry is high. Since Verlaine 
we hardly dare to think of another poet of such 
charm, verve, originality. An anarchist with 
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EGOISTS 

Sebastien Faure and Jean Grave, a Socialist of 
all brands, a lighted lyric torch among the insur- 
rectionists, a symbolist, a writer of "free verse " 
(which is hedged in by more rules, though un- 
formulated and unwritten, than the stiffest aca- 
demic production of Boileau), Adolphe Rette led 
the life of an individualist poet; precisely the 
sort of life at which pulpit-pounders could point 
and cry: " There, there is your aesthetic poet, 
your man of feeling, of finer feelings than his 
neighbours! Behold to what base uses he has put 
this gift! See him wallowing with the swine !" 
And, practically, these words Rette has employed 
in speaking of himself. He insulted religion in 
the boulevard journals; he hailed with joy the 
separation of Church and State. He wrote not 
too decent novels, though his verse is feathered 
with the purest pinions. He treated his wife 
badly, neglecting her for the inevitable Other 
Woman. (What a banal example this is, after 
all.) He once, so he tells us to his horror, mal- 
treated the poor woman because of her piety. 
Typical, you will say. Then why confess it in 
several hundred pages of rhythmic prose, why 
rehearse for gaping, indifferent Paris the thread- 
bare, sordid tale? Paris, too, so cynical on the 
subject of conversions, and also very suspicious 
of such a spiritual bouleversement as Rette's ! " No, 
it won't do, Huysmans is to blame/' exclaimed 
many. 

Yet this conversion — literally one, for he was 
educated in a Protestant college — is sincere. 
300 



MYSTICS 

He means every word he says; and if he is copious- 
ly rhetorical, set it all down to the literary temper- 
ament. He wrote not only with the approval of 
his spiritual counsellor, but also for the same 
reason as Saint Augustine or Bunyan. Newman's 
confession was an Apologia, an answer to Kings- 
ley's challenge. With Huysmans, he is such a 
consummate artist that we could imagine him 
plotting ahead his cycle of novels (if novels they 
are) ; from La-Bas to Lourdes the spiritual modu- 
lation is harmonious. Now, M. Rette (he was 
born in 1863 in Paris of an Ardennaise family), 
while he has sung in his melodious voice many al- 
luring songs, while he has shown the impressions 
wrought upon his spirit by Walt Whitman and 
Richard Wagner, there is little in the rich extrava- 
gance of his love for nature or the occasional 
Vergilian silver calm of his verse — he can sound 
more than one chord on his poetic keyboard — 
to prepare us for the great plunge into the healing 
waters of faith. A pagan nature shows in his 
early work, apart from the hatred and contempt 
he later displayed toward religion. How did 
it all come about ? He has related it in this book, 
and we are free to confess that, though we must 
not challenge the author's sincerity, his manner 
is far from reassuring. He is of the brood of 
Baudelaire. 

Huysmans frankly gave up the riddle in his own 
case. Atavism may have had its way; he had 
relatives who were in convents; a pessimism that 
drove him from the world also contributed its 

301 



EGOISTS 

share in the change. Personally Huysmans pre- 
fers to set it down to the mercy and grace of God 
— which is the simplest definition after all. 
When we are through with these self-accusing 
men; when professional psychology is tired of 
inventing new terminologies, then let us do as 
did Huysmans — go back to the profoundest of 
all the psychologists, the pioneers of the moderns, 
Saint Theresa — what actual, virile magnifi- 
cence is in her Castle of the Soul — Saint John of 
the Cross, and Ruysbroeck. They are mystics 
possessing a fierce faith; and without faith a 
mystic is like a moon without the sun. Adolphe 
Rette knows the great Spanish mystics and quotes 
them almost as liberally as Huysmans. But with 
a difference. He has read Huysmans too closely; 
books breed books, ideas and moods beget moods 
and ideas. We are quite safe in saying that if 
En Route had not been written, Rette's Du Diable 
a Dieu could not have appeared in its present 
shape. The similarity is both external and in- 
ternal. John of the Cross had his Night Obscure, 
so has M. Rette; Huysmans, however, showed 
him the way. Rette holds an obstinate dialogue 
with the Devil (who is a capitalized creature). 
Consult the wonderful fifth chapter in En Route. 
Naturally there must be a certain resemblance in 
these spiritual adventures when the Evil One 
captures the outposts of the soul and makes sud- 
den savage dashes into its depths. Rette's style 
is not in the least like Huysmans's. It is more 
fluent, swifter, and more staccato. You skim his 
302 



MYSTICS 

pages; in Huysmans you recognise the distilled 
remorse; you move as in a penitential procession, 
the rhythms grave, the eyes dazzled by the vision 
divine, the voice lowly chanting. Not so Rette, 
who glibly discourses on sacred territory, who is 
terribly at ease in Zion. 

Almost gayly he recounts his misdeeds. He 
pelts his former associates with hard names. He 
pities Anatole France for his socialistic affinities. 
All that formerly attracted him is anathema. 
Even the mysterious lady with the dark eyes is 
castigated. She is not a truth-teller. She does 
not now understand the protean soul of her poet. 
Retro me Sathanas! It is very exhilarating. The 
Gallic soul in its most resilient humour is on view. 
See it rebound ! Watch it ascend on high, buoyed 
by delicious phrases, asking sweet pardon; then 
it falls to earth abusing its satanic adversary with 
sinister energy. At times we overhear the honeyed 
accents, the silky tones of Renan. It is he, not 
Rette, who exclaims: Mais quelles douces larmes! 
Ah ! Renan — also a cork soul ! The . Imitation 
is much dwelt upon — the influence of Huysmans 
has been incalculable in this. And we forgive 
M. Rette his theatricalism for the lovely French 
paraphrase he has made of Salve Regina. But 
on the whole we prefer En Route. The starting- 
point of Rette's change was reading some verse 
in the Purgatory of the Divine Comedy. A lit- 
erary conversion? Possibly, yet none the less 
complete. All roads lead to Rome, and the Road 
to Damascus may be achieved from many devious 

303 



EGOISTS 

side paths. But in writing with such engaging 
frankness the memoirs of his soul we wish that 
Rette had more carefully followed the closing 
sentence of his brilliant little book: Non nobis, 
Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam! 

V 
FROM AN IVORY TOWER 

"Their impatience/' was the answer once given 
by Cardinal Newman to the question, What is 
the chief fault of heresiarchs? In this category 
Walter Pater never could have been included, 
for his life was a long patience. As Newman 
sought patiently for the evidences of faith, so 
Pater sought for beauty, that beauty of thought 
and expression, of which his work is a supreme 
exemplar in modern English literature. Flau- 
bert, a man of genius with whom he was in sympa- 
thy, toiled no harder for the perfect utterance of 
his ideas than did this retiring Oxford man of 
letters. And, like his happy account of Raphael's 
growth, Pater was himself a " genius by accumu- 
lation; the transformation of meek scholarship 
into genius." 

Walter Pater's intimate life was once almost 
legendary. We heard more of him a quarter of a 
century ago than yesterday. This does not mean 
that his vogue has declined; on the contrary, he 
is a force at the present such as he never was either 
at Oxford or London. But of the living man, 
304 



MYSTICS 

notwithstanding his shyness, stray notes crept into 
print. He wrote occasional reviews. He had 
disciples. He had adversaries who deplored his 
— admittedly remote — immoral influence upon 
impressionable, "slim, gilt souls"; he had critics 
who detected the truffle of evil in savouring his 
exotic style. When he died, in 1894, the air was 
cleared by his devoted friends, Edmund Gosse, 
Lionel Johnson, William Sharp, Arthur Symons, 
and some of his Oxford associates, Dr. Bussell 
and Mr. Shadwell. It was proved without a 
possibility of doubt that the popular conception 
of the man was far from the reality; that the real 
Pater was a plain liver and an austere thinker; 
that he was not the impassive Mandarin of litera- 
ture pictured by some; that the hedonism, epi- 
cureanism, cyrenaicism of which he had been 
vaguely accused had been a confounding of intel- 
lectual substances, a slipshod method of thought 
he abhorred; that his entire career had been spent 
in the pursuit of an aesthetic and moral perfection 
and its embodiment in prose of a rarely individual 
and haunting music. Recall his half-petulant, 
half-ironical exclamation of disgust to Mr. Gosse : 
"I wish they wouldn't call me a 'hedonist'; it 
produces such a bad effect on the minds of people 
who don't know Greek." He would have been 
quite in accord with Paul Bourget's dictum that 
"there is no such thing as health, or the contrary, 
in the world of the soul"; Bourget, who, lectur- 
ing later at Oxford, pronounced Walter Pater 
"un parfait prosateur." 
305 



EGOISTS 

Despite the attempt to chain him to the chari- 
ots of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, Pater, like 
Chopin, during the Romantic turmoil, stood aloof 
from the heat and dust of its battles. He was at 
first deeply influenced by Goethe and Ruskin, 
and was a friend of Swinburne's; he wrote of the 
Morris poetry; but his was not the polemical cast 
of mind. The love of spiritual combat, the holy 
zeal of John Henry Newman, of Keble, of Hurrell 
Froude, were not in his bones. And so his schol- 
ar's life, the measured existence of a recluse, was 
uneventful; but measured by the results, what a 
vivid, intense, life it was. There is, however, 
very little to tell of Walter Pater. His was the 
interior life. In his books is his life — hasn't 
some one said that all great literature is auto- 
biographical ? 

There are articles by the late William Sharp 
and by George Moore. The former in Some 
Personal Recollections of Walter Pater, written 
in 1894, gave a vivid picture of the man, though 
it remained for Mr. Moore to discover his ugly 
face and some peculiar minor characteristics. 
Sharp met Pater in 1880 at the house of George 
T. Robinson, in Gower Street, that delightful 
meeting-place of gifted people. Miss A. Mary F. 
Robinson, now Mme. Duclaux, was the tutelary 
genius. She introduced Sharp to Pater. The 
blind poet, Philip Bourke Marston, was of the 
party. Pater at that time was a man of medium 
height, stooping slightly, heavily built, with a 
Dutch or Flemish cast of features, a pale com- 
306 



MYSTICS 

plexion, a heavy moustache — a a possible Bis- 
marck, a Bismarck who had become a dreamer/' 
adds the keen observer. A friendship was struck 
up between the pair. Pater came out of his shell, 
talked wittily, paradoxically, and later at Oxford 
showed his youthful admirer the poetic side of 
his singularly complex nature. There are conver- 
sations recorded and letters printed which would 
have added to the value of Mr. Benson's memoir. 
Mr. Moore's recollections are slighter, though 
extremely engaging. Above all, with his trained 
eye of a painter, he sketches for us another view 
of Pater, one not quite so attractive. Mr. Moore 
saw a very ugly man — "it was like looking at a 
leaden man, an uncouth figure, badly moulded, 
moulded out of lead, a large, uncouth head, the 
head of a clergyman, ... a large, overarching 
skull, and small eyes; they always seemed afraid 
of you, and they shifted quickly. There seemed 
to be a want of candour in Pater's face, ... an 
abnormal fear of his listener and himself. There 
was little hair on the great skull, and his skull 
and his eyes reminded me a little of the French 
poet Verlaine, a sort of domesticated Verlaine, 
a Protestant Verlaine." His eyes were green- 
gray, and in middle life he wore a brilliant apple- 
green tie and the inevitable top-hat and frock 
coat of an urban Englishman. In one of his 
early essays Max Beerbohm thus describes Pater: 
u a small, thick, rock- faced man, whose top-hat 
and gloves of bright dog skin struck one of 
the many discords in that little city of learning 
307 



EGOISTS 

and laughter. The serried bristles of his mus- 
tachio made for him a false-military air." Pater 
is said to have come of Dutch stock. Mr. Ben- 
son declares that it has not been proved. He had 
the amiable fancy that he may have had in his 
veins some of the blood of Jean Baptiste Pater, 
the painter. His father was born in New York. 
He went to England, and near London in 1839 
Walter Horatio, his second son, was born. To 
The Child in the House and Emerald Uthwart, 
both " imaginary portraits," we may go for the 
early life of Pater, as Marius is the idealized 
record of his young manhood. When a child he 
was fond of playing Bishop, and the bent of his 
mind was churchly, further fostered by his so- 
journ at Canterbury. He matriculated at Oxford 
in 1858 as a commoner of Queen's College, where 
he was graduated after being coached by Jowett, 
who said to his pupil, "I think you have a mind 
that will come to great eminence." Years after- 
ward the Master of Balliol seems to have changed 
his opinion, possibly urged thereto by the parody 
of Pater as Mr. Rose by Mr. Mallock in The New 
Republic. Jowett spoke of Pater as "the demor- 
alizing moralizer," while Mr. Freeman could see 
naught in him but "the mere conjurer of words 
and phrases." Others have denounced his "pulpy 
magnificence of style," and Max Beerbohm de- 
clared that Pater wrote English as if it were a 
dead language; possibly an Irish echo of Pater's 
own assertion that English should be written as a 
learned language. 

308 



MYSTICS 

He became a Fellow of Brasenose, and Oxford 
— with the exception of a few years spent in 
London, and his regular annual summer visits 
to Italy, France, and Germany, where he took 
long walks and studied the churches and art 
galleries — became his home. Contradictory leg- 
ends still float in the air regarding his absorbed 
demeanour, his extreme sociability, his compan- 
ionable humour, his chilly manner, his charming 
home, his barely furnished room, with the bowl of 
dried rose leaves; his sympathies, antipathies, 
nervousness, and baldness, and, like Baudelaire, 
of his love of cats, and a host of mutually exclusive 
qualities. Mr. Zangwill relates that he told Pater 
he had discovered a pun in one of his essays. 
Thereat, great embarrassment on Pater's part. 
Symons, who knew him intimately, tells of his 
reading the dictionary — that " pianoforte of 
writers," as Mr. Walter Raleigh cleverly names it 
— for the opposite reason that Gautier did, i.e., 
that he might learn what words to avoid. An- 
other time Symons asked him the meaning of a 
terrible sentence, Ruskinian in length and invo- 
lution. Pater carefully scanned the page, and 
after a few minutes said with a sigh of relief: 
"Ah, I see the printer has omitted a dash." Yet, 
with all this meticulous precision, Pater was a 
man with an individual style, and not a mere 
stylist. What he said was of more importance 
than the saying of it. 

The portraits of Pater are, so his friends de- 
clare, unlike him. He had irregular features, 

309 



EGOISTS 

and his jaw was prognathic; but there was great 
variety of expression, and the eyes, set deeply in 
the head, glowed with a jewelled fire when he was 
deeply aroused. In Mr. Greenslet's wholly ad- 
mirable appreciation, there is a portrait executed 
by the unfortunate Simeon Solomon, and dated 
1872. There is in Mosher's edition of the Guard- 
ian Essays a copy of Will Rothenstein's study, a 
characteristic piece of work, though Mr. Benson 
says it is not considered a resemblance. And 
I have a picture, a half-tone, from some maga- 
zine, the original evidently photographic, that 
shows a Pater much more powerful in expres- 
sion than the others, and without a hint of the 
ambiguous that lurks in Rothenstein's drawing 
and Moore's pen portrait. Pater never married. 
Like Newman, he had a talent for friendship. As 
with Newman, Keble, that beautiful soul, made a 
deep impression on him, and, again like Newman, 
to use his own words, he went his way "like one 
on a secret errand." 

And the Pater style! Matthew Arnold on a 
certain occasion advised Frederic Harrison to 
"flee Carlylese as the very devil," and doubtless 
would have given the same advice regarding 
Paterese. Pater is a dangerous guide for students. 
This theme of style, so admirably vivified in Mr. 
Walter Raleigh's monograph, was worn threadbare 
during the days when Pater was slowly producing 
one book every few years — he wrote five in twenty 
years, at the rate of an essay or two a year, thus 
matching Flaubert in his tormented production, 
310 



MYSTICS 

The principal accusation brought against the Pater 
method of work and the Pater style is that it is 
lacking in spontaneity, in a familiar phrase, "it 
is not natural." But a "natural" style, so called, 
appears not more than a half dozen times in its 
full flowering during the course of a century. The 
French write all but faultless prose. To match 
Flaubert, Renan, or Anatole France, we must go 
to Ruskin, Pater, and Newman. When we say: 
"Let us write simple, straightforward English," 
we are setting a standard that has been reached 
of late years only by Thackeray, Newman, and 
few besides. There are as many victims of the 
"natural English" formula as there are of the 
artificial formula of a Pater or a Stevenson. The 
former write careless, flabby, colourless, undis- 
tinguished, lean, commercial English, and pass 
unnoticed in the vast whirlpool of universal 
mediocrity, where the cliche is king of the para- 
graph. The others, victims to a misguided ideal 
of "fine writing," are more easily detected. 

Now, properly speaking, there is no such thing 
as a "natural" style. Even Newman confesses 
to laborious days, though he wrote with the idea 
uppermost, and with no thought of the style. 
Renan, perfect master, disliked the idea of teach- 
ing "style" — as if it could be taught! — yet he 
worked over his manuscripts. We all know the 
Flaubert case. With Pater one must not rush 
to the conclusion that because he produced slowly 
and with infinite pains, he was all artificiality. 
Prose for him was a fine art. He would no more 
3ii 



EGOISTS 

have used a phrase coined by another man than 
he would have worn his hat. He embroidered 
upon the canvas of his ideas the grave and lovely 
phrases we envy and admire. Prose — "cette 
ancienne et tres jalouse chose," as it was called 
by Stephane Mallarme — was for Pater at once 
a pattern and a cadence, a picture and a song. 
Never suggesting hybrid " poetic-prose,' ' the great 
stillness of his style — atmospheric, languorous, 
sounding sweet undertones — is always in the 
rhythm of prose. Speed is absent; the tempo is 
usually lenten; brilliance is not pursued; but there 
is a hieratic, almost episcopal, pomp and power. 
The sentences uncoil their many-coloured lengths; 
there are echoes, repercussions, tonal imagery, 
and melodic evocation ; there is clause within clause 
that occasionally confuses; for compensation we 
are given newly orchestrated harmonies, as 
mordant, as salient, and as strange as some chords 
in the music of Chopin, Debussy and Richard 
Strauss. Sane it always is — simple seldom. 
And, as Symons observes: "Under the soft 
and musical phrases an inexorable logic hides 
itself, sometimes only too well. Link is added 
silently but faultlessly to link; the argument 
marches, carrying you with it, while you fancy 
you are only listening to the music with which 
it keeps step." It is very personal, and while it 
does not make melody for every ear, it is exquisitely 
adapted to the idea it clothes. Read aloud Rus- 
kin and then apply the same vocal test — Flau- 
bert's procedure — to Pater, and the magnificence 
312 



MYSTICS 

of the older man will conquer your ear by storm; 
but Pater, like Newman, will make it captive in 
a persuasive snare more delicately varied, more 
subtle, and with modulations more enchanting. 
Never oratorical, in eloquence slightly muffled, 
his last manner hinted that he had sought for 
newer combinations. Of his prose we may say, 
employing his own words concerning another 
theme: "It is a beauty wrought from within, . . . 
the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts 
and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions." 

The prose of Jeremy Taylor is more im- 
passioned, Browne's richer, there are deeper organ 
tones in De Quincey's, Ruskin's excels in effects, 
rhythmic and sonorous; but the prose of Pater is 
subtler, more sinuous, more felicitous, and in its 
essence consummately intense. Morbid it some- 
times is, and its rich polyphony palls if you are 
not in the mood; and in greater measure than the 
prose of the other masters, for the world is older 
and Pater was weary of life. But a suggestion 
of morbidity may be found in the writings of every 
great writer from Plato to Dante, from Shake- 
speare to Goethe; it is the faint spice of mortality 
that lends a stimulating if sharp perfume to all 
literatures. Beautiful art has been challenged 
as corrupting. There may be a grain of truth in 
the charge. But man cannot live by wisdom 
alone, so art was invented to console, disquiet, 
and arouse him. Whenever a poet appears he 
is straightway accused of tampering with the 
moral code; it is mediocrity's mode of adjusting 
313 



EGOISTS 

violent mental disproportions. But persecution 
never harmed a genuine talent, and the accusa- 
tions against the art of Pater only provoked from 
him such beautiful books as Imaginary Portraits, 
Marius the Epicurean, and Plato and Platonism. 
Therefore let us be grateful to the memory of his 
enemies. 

There is another Pater, a Pater far removed 
from the one who wove such silken and coloured 
phrases. If he sometimes recalls Keats in the 
rich texture of his prose, he can also suggest the 
aridity of Herbert Spencer. There are early essays 
of his that are as cold, as logically adamant, and as 
tortuous as sentences from the Synthetic Philoso- 
phy. Pater was a metaphysician before he be- 
came an artist. Luckily for us, his tendency to 
bald theorising was subdued by the broad human- 
ism of his temperament. There are not many 
" purple patches" in his prose, "purple" in the 
De Quincey or Ruskin manner; no " fringes of 
the north star" style, to use South's mocking ex- 
pression. He never wrote in sheer display. 
For the boorish rhetoric and apish attitudes of 
much modern drama he betrayed no sympathy. 
His critical range is catholic. Consider his essays 
on Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Winckelmann, 
setting aside those finely wrought masterpieces, 
the studies of Da Vinci, Giorgione, and Botticelli. 
As Mr. Benson puts it, Pater was not a modern 
scientific or archaeological critic, but the fact that 
Morelli has proved the Concert of Giorgione not to 
be by that master, or that Vinci is not all Pater 
3*4 



MYSTICS 

says he is, does not vitiate the essential values of 
his criticism. 

Like Maurice Barres, Pater was an egoist of 
the higher type; he seldom left the twilight of 
his tour (Tivoire; yet his work is human anci con- 
crete to the core. Nothing interested him so much 
as the human quality in art. This he ever sought 
to disengage. Pater was a deeply religious nature 
aufond, perhaps addicted a trifle to moral preci- 
osity, and, as Mr. Greenslet says, a lyrical pan- 
theist. His essay on Pascal, without plumbing 
the ethical depths as does Leslie Stephen's study 
of the same thinker, gives us a fair measure of 
his own religious feelings. A pagan with Ana- 
tole France in his worship of Greek art and liter- 
ature, his profounder Northern temperament, 
a Spartan temperament, strove for spiritual things, 
for the vision of things behind the veil. The 
Paters had been Roman Catholic for many gen- 
erations; his father was not, and he was raised 
in the Church of England. But the ritual of the 
older Church was for him a source of delight and 
consolation. Mr. Benson deserves unstinted praise 
for his denunciation of the pseudo-Paterians, the 
self-styled disciples, who, totally misinterpreting 
Pater's pure philosophy of life, translated the 
more ephemeral phases of his cyrenaicism into 
the grosser terms of a gaudy aesthetic. These 
defections pained the thinker, whose study of 
Plato had extorted praise from Jowett. He 
even withdrew the much-admired conclusion of 
The Renaissance because of the wilful miscon- 

3i5 



EGOISTS 

structions put upon it. He never achieved the 
ataraxia of his beloved master. And Oxford 
was grudging of her favour to him long after the 
world had acclaimed his genius. Sensitive he 
was, 'though Mr. Gosse denies the stories of his 
suffering from harsh criticism; but there were 
some forms of criticism that he could not over- 
look. Books like his Plato and Marius the Epicur- 
ean were adequate answers to detractors. Some- 
what cloistered in his attitude toward the normal 
world of work; too much the artist for art's sake, 
he may never trouble the greater currents of litera- 
ture; but he will always be a writer for writers, 
the critic whose vision pierces the shell of ap- 
pearances, the composer of a polyphonic prose- 
music that recalls the performance of harmonious 
adagio within the sonorous spaces of a Gothic 
cathedral, through the windows of which filters 
alien daylight. It was a favourite contention of 
his that all the arts constantly aspire toward the 
condition of music. This idea is the keynote of 
his poetic scheme, the keynote of Walter Pater, 
mystic and musician, who, like his own Marius, 
carried his life long "in his bosom across a 
crowded public place — his own soul." 



316 



IX 
IBSEN 



Henrik Ibsen was the best-hated artist of the 
nineteenth century. The reason is simple: He 
was, himself, the arch-hater of his age. Yet,, 
granting this, the Norwegian dramatist aroused 
in his contemporaries a wrath that would have 
been remarkable even if emanating from the 
fiery pit of politics; in the comparatively serene 
field of aesthetics such overwhelming attacks from 
the critics of nearly every European nation testi- 
fied to the singular power displayed by this poet. 
Richard Wagner was not so abused; the theatre 
of his early operations was confined to Germany, 
the Tannhauser fiasco in Paris a unique excep- 
tion. Wagner, too, did everything that was 
possible to provoke antagonism. He scored his 
critics in speech and pamphlet. He gave back 
as hard names as he received. Ibsen never 
answered, either in print or by the mouth of 
friends, the outrageous allegations brought against 
him. Indeed, his disciples often darkened the 
issue by their unsolicited, uncritical championship. 

3i7 



EGOISTS 

In Edouard Manet, the revolutionary Parisian 
painter and head of the so-ealled impressionist 
movement — himself not altogether deserving 
the appellation — we have an analogous case to 
Wagner's. Ridicule, calumny, vituperation, pur- 
sued him for many years. But Paris was the 
principal scene of his struggles; Taris mocked 
him, not all Europe. Even the indignation 
aroused by Nietzsche was a comparatively local 
affair. Wagner is the only man who approaches 
Ibsen in the massiveness of his martyrdom. Yet 
Wagner had consolations for his opponents. His 
music-drama, so rich in colour and rhythmic 
beauty, his romantic themes, his appeal to the 
eye, his friendship with Ludwig of Bavaria, at 
times placated his fiercest detractors. Manet 
painted one or two successes for the official Salon; 
Nietzsche's brilliant style and faculty for coin- 
ing poetic images were acclaimed, his philosophy 
declared detestable. Yes, fine phrases may make 
tine psychologies. Robert Browning never felt 
the heavy hand of public opinion as did Ibsen. 
We must go back to the days of Byron and Shel- 
ley for an example of such uncontrollable and 
unanimous condemnation. But, again, Ibsen 
tops them all as victim of storms that blew from 
every quarter: Norway to Austria, England to 
Italy, Russia to America. There were no miti- 
gating circumstances in his lese-tnajeste against 
popular taste. No musical rhyme, scenic splen- 
dour, or rhythmic prose, acted as an emotional 
butler between him and his audiences. His social 

318 



IBSEN 

dramas were condemned as the sordid, heartless 
productions of a mediocre poet, who wittingly 
debased our moral currency. And as they did 
not offer as bribes the amatory intrigue, the witty 
dialogue, the sensual arabesques of the French 
stage, or the stilted rhetoric and heroic postures 
of the German, they were assailed from every 
critical watch-tower in Europe. Ibsen was a 
stranger, Ibsen was disdainfully silent, there- 
fore Ibsen must be annihilated. Possibly if he 
had, like Wagner, explained his dramas, we 
should have had confusion thrice confounded. 

The day after his death the entire civilised 
world wrote of him as the great man he was: great 
man, great artist, great moralist. And A DolPs 
House only saw the light in 1879 — so potent 
a creator of critical perspective is Death. There 
were, naturally, many dissonant opinions in this 
symphony of praise. Yet how different it all 
read from the opinions of a decade ago. Ad- 
verse criticism, especially in America, was vitiated 
by the fact that Ibsen the dramatist was hardly 
known here. Ibsen was eagerly read, but sel- 
dom played; and rarely played as he should be. 
He is first the dramatist. His are not closet 
dramas to be leisurely digested by lamp-light; 
conceived for the theatre, actuality their key-note, 
his characters are pale abstractions on the printed 
page — not to mention the inevitable distortions 
to be found in the closest translation. We are 
all eager to tell what we think of him. But do 
we know him ? Do we know him as do the play- 
s' 



EGOISTS 

goers of Berlin, or St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, 
Vienna, or Munich ? And do we realise his tech- 
nical prowess? In almost every city of Europe 
Ibsen is in the regular repertory. He is given 
at intervals with Shakespeare, Schiller, Dumas, 
Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Grillparzer, Hervieu, 
Sudermann, and with the younger dramatists. 
That is the true test. Not the isolated divinity 
of a handful of worshippers, with an esoteric mes- 
sage, his plays are interpreted by skilled actors 
and not for the untrained if enthusiastic amateur. 
There is no longer Ibsenism on the Continent; 
Ibsen is recognised as the greatest dramatist since 
Racine and Moliere. Cults claim him no more, 
and therefore the critical point of view at the 
time of his death had entirely shifted. His works 
are played in every European language and have 
been translated into the Japanese. 

The mixed blood in the veins of Ibsen may ac- 
count for his temperament; he was more Danish 
than Norwegian, and there were German and 
Scotch strains in his ancestry. Such obscure 
forces of heredity doubtless played a role in his 
career. Norwegian in his love of freedom, Da- 
nish in his artistic bent, his philosophic cast of 
mind was wholly Teutonic. Add to these a pos- 
sible theologic prepossession derived from the 
Scotch, a dramatic technique in which Scribe and 
Sophocles are not absent, and we have to deal 
with a disquieting problem. Ibsen was a mystery 
to his friends and foes. Hence the avidity with 
which he is claimed by idealists, realists, socialists, 
320 



IBSEN 

anarchists, symbolists, by evangelical folk, and 
by agnostics. There were in him many contra- 
dictory elements. Denounced as a pessimist, all 
his great plays have, notwithstanding, an unmis- 
takable message of hope, from Brand to When 
We Dead Awake. An idealist he is, but one who 
has realised the futility of dreams; like all world- 
satirists, he castigates to purify. His realism is 
largely a matter of surfaces, and if we care to look 
we may find the symbol lodged in the most prosaic 
of his pieces. His anarchy consists in a firm ad- 
herence to the doctrine of individualism; Emer- 
son and Thoreau are of his spiritual kin. In 
both there is the contempt for mob-rule, mob- 
opinion; for both the minority is the true rational 
unit; and with both there is a certain aloofness 
from mankind. Yet we do not denounce Em- 
erson or Thoreau as enemies of the people. To 
be candid, Ibsen's belief in the rights of the indi- 
vidual is rather naive and antiquated, belonging 
as it does to the tempestuous period of '48. Max 
Stirner was far in advance of the playwright in 
his political and menacing egoism; while Nietz- 
sche, who loathed democracy, makes Ibsen's 
aristocracy timid by comparison. 

Ibsen can hardly be called a philosophic 
anarch, for the body of doctrine, either political 
or moral, deducible from his plays is so perplex- 
ing by reason of its continual affirmation and ne- 
gation, so blurred by the kaleidoscopic clash of 
character, that one can only fuse these mutually 
exclusive qualities by realising him as a dramatist 

321 



EGOISTS 

who has created a microcosmic world; in a word, 
we must look upon the man as a creator of dra- 
matic character not as a theorist. And his char- 
acters have all the logical illogicality of life. 

Several traits emerge from this welter of cross- 
purposes and action. Individualism is a lead- 
ing motive from the first to the last play; a strong 
sense of moral responsibility — an oppressive 
sense, one is tempted to add — is blended 
with a curious flavour of Calvinism, in which 
are traces of predestination. A more singular 
equipment for a modern dramatist is barely 
conceivable. Soon we discover that Ibsen is 
playing with the antique dramatic counters 
under another name. Free-will and determinism 
— what are these but the very breath of classic 
tragedy! In one of his rare moments of expan- 
sion he said: "Many things and much upon 
which my later work has turned — the contra- 
diction between endowment and desire, between 
capacity and will, at once the entire tragedy 
and comedy of mankind — may here be dim- 
ly discerned. " Moral responsibility evaded is 
a favourite theme of his. No Furies of the Greek 
drama pursued their victims with such relent- 
less vengeance as pursues the unhappy wretches 
of Ibsen. In Ghosts, the old scriptural wisdom 
concerning the sins of parents is vividly ex- 
pounded, though the heredity doctrine is sadly 
overworked. As in other plays of his, there were 
false meanings read into the interpretation; the 
realism of Ghosts is negligible; the symbol looms 
322 



IBSEN 

large in every scene. Search Ibsen throughout 
and it will be found that his subject-matter is 
fundamentally the same as that of all great 
masters of tragedy. It is his novel manner of 
presentation, his transposition of themes hitherto 
treated epically, to the narrow, unheroic scale of 
middle-class family life that blinded critics to his 
true significance. This tuning down of the heroic, 
this reversal of the old aesthetic order extorted bitter 
remonstrances. If we kill the ideal in art and 
life, what have we left? was the cry. But Ibsen 
attacks false as well as true ideals and does not 
always desert us after stripping us of our self- 
respect. A poet of doubt he is, who seldom at- 
tempts a solution; but he is also a puritan — a 
positivist puritan — and his scourgings are an 
equivalent for that katharsis, in the absence of 
which Aristotle denied the title of tragedy. 

Consider, then, how Ibsen was misunderstood. 
Setting aside the historical and poetic works, we 
are confronted in the social plays by the average 
man and woman of every-day life. They live, 
as a rule, in mediocre circumstances; they are 
harried by the necessities of quotidian existence. 
Has this undistinguished bourgeoisie the poten- 
tialities of romance, of tragedy, of beauty? 
Wait, says Ibsen, and you will see your own soul, 
the souls of the man and woman who jostle you 
in the street, the same soul in palace or hovel, that 
orchestra of cerebral sensations, the human soul. 
And it is the truth he speaks. We follow with 
growing uneasiness his exposition of a soul. The 

323 



EGOISTS 

spectacle is not pleasing. In his own magical 
but charmless way the souls of his people are 
turned inside out during an evening. No mono- 
logues, no long speeches, no familiar machinery 
of the drama, are employed. But the miracle is 
there. You face yourself. Is it any wonder that 
public and critic alike waged war against this 
showman of souls, this new psychologist of the 
unflattering, this past master of disillusionment? 
For centuries poets, tragic and comic, satiric 
and lyric, have been exalting, teasing, mocking, 
and lulling mankind. When Aristophanes flayed 
his victims he sang a merry tune; Shakespeare, 
with Olympian amiability, portrayed saint and 
sinner alike to the accompaniment of a divine 
music. But Ibsen does not cajole, amuse, or 
bribe with either just or specious illusions. He is 
determined to tell the truth of our microcosmic 
baseness. The truth is his shibboleth. And 
when enounced its sound is not unlike the chant- 
ing of a Nox I'rae. He lifted the ugly to heroic 
heights; the ignoble he analysed with the cold 
ardour of a moral biologist — the ignoble, that 
"sublime of the lower slopes," as Flaubert has it. 
This psychological method was another rock 
of offence. Why transform the playhouse into 
a school of metaphysics ? But Ibsen is not a meta- 
physician and his characters are never abstrac- 
tions; instead, they are very lively humans. They 
offend those who believe the theatre to be a place 
of sentimentality or clowning; these same Ibsen 
men and women offend the lovers of Shakespeare 
3 2 4 



IBSEN 

and the classics. We know they are real, yet we 
dislike them as we dislike animals trained to imi- 
tate humanity too closely. The simian gestures 
cause a feeling of repulsion in both cases; surely 
we are not of such stock! And we move away. 
So do we sometimes turn from the Ibsen stage 
when human souls are made to go through a 
series of sorrowful evolutions by their stern trainer. 
To what purpose such revelations? Is it art? 
Is not our ideal of a nobler humanity shaken ? 

Ibsen's report of the human soul as he sees it 
is his right, the immemorial right of priest, 
prophet, or artist. All our life is a huge lie if this 
right be denied; from the Preacher to Schopen- 
hauer, from lEschylus to Moliere, the man who 
reveals, in parable or as in a mirror, the soul of 
his fellow T -being is a man who is a benefactor of 
his kind, if he be not a cynical spirit that de- 
nies. Ibsen is a satirist of a superior degree; 
he has the gift of creating a Weltspiegel in which 
we see the shape of our souls. He is never the 
cynic, though he has portrayed the cynic in his 
plays. He has too much moral earnestness to 
view the world merely as a vile jest. That he is 
an artist is acknowledged. And for the ideals 
dear to us which he so savagely attacks, he so 
clears the air about some old familiar, mist- 
haunted ideal of duty, that we wonder if we have 
hitherto mistaken its meaning. 

From being denounced as a corrupter of youth, 
an anarch of letters, a debaser of current moral 
coin, we have learned to view him as a force ma- 

3 2 5 



EGOISTS 

king for righteousness, as a master of his craft, 
and as a creator of a large gallery of remarkably 
vivid human characters. We know now that 
many modern dramatists have carried their pails 
to this vast northern lake and from its pine- 
hemmed and sombre waters have secretly drawn 
sparkling inspiration. 

The truth is that Ibsen can be no longer de- 
nied — we exclude the wilfully blind — by critic 
or public. He is too big a man to be locked up 
in a library as if he were full of vague forbidden 
wickedness. When competently interpreted he 
is never offensive; the scenes to which the crit- 
ics refer as smacking of sex are mildness itself 
compared to the doings of Sardou's lascivious 
marionettes. In the theatrical sense his are not 
sex plays, as are those of Dumas the younger. 
He discusses woman as a social as well as a 
psychical problem. Any picture of love is toler- 
ated so it be frankly sentimental; but let Ibsen 
mention the word sex and there is a call to arms 
by the moral policemen of the drama. Thus, 
by some critical hocus-pocus the world was led 
for years to believe that this lofty thinker, moral- 
ist, and satirist concealed an immoral teacher. 
It is an old trick of the enemy to place upon an 
author's shoulders the doings and sayings of his 
mimic people. Ibsen was fathered with all the 
sins of his characters. Instead of being studied 
from life, they were, so many averred, the result 
of a morbid brain, the brain of a pessimist and a 
hater of his kind. 

326 



IBSEN 

We have seen that Ibsen offended by his disre- 
gard of academic dramatic attitudes. His per- 
sonages are ordinary, yet like Browning's mean- 
est soul they have a human side to show us. The 
inherent stuff of his plays is tragic; but the hero 
and heroine do not stamp, stalk, or spout blank 
verse; it is the tragedy of life without the sop of 
sentiment usually administered by second-rate 
poets. Missing the colour and decoration, the 
pretty music, and the eternal simper of the sen- 
sual, we naturally turn our back on such a writer. 
If he knows souls, he certainly does not under- 
stand the box-office. This for the negative side. 
On the positive, the apparent baldness of the 
narrative, the ugliness of his men and women, 
their utterance of ideas foreign to cramped, con- 
vention-ridden lives, mortify us immeasurably. 
The tale always ends badly or sadly. And 
when one of his characters begins to talk about 
the "joy of life," it is the gloom of life that is 
evoked. The women — and here is the shock 
to our masculine vanity — the women assert 
themselves too much, telling men that they are 
not what they believe themselves to be. Lastly, 
the form of the Ibsen play is compact with ideas 
and emotion. We usually don't go to the theatre 
to think or to feel. With Ibsen we must think, 
and think closely; we must feel — worse still, 
be thrilled to our marrow by the spectacle of our 
own spiritual skeletons. No marvellous music 
is there to heal the wounded nerves as in Tristan 
and Isolde; no prophylactic for the merciless 
327 



EGOISTS 

acid of the dissector. We either breathe a rarefied 
atmosphere in his Brand and in When We Dead 
Awake, or else, in the social drama, the air is so 
dense with the intensity of the closely wrought 
moods that we gasp as if in the chamber of a 
diving-bell. Human, all too human! 

Protean in his mental and spiritual activities, 
a hater of shams — religious, political, and 
social shams — more symbolist than realist, in 
assent with Goethe that no material is unfit for 
poetic treatment, the substance of Ibsen's moral- 
ity consists in his declaration that men to be free 
must first free themselves. Once, in addressing 
a group of Norwegian workmen, he told them 
that man must ennoble himself, he must will him- 
self free; "to will is to have to will," as he says 
in Emperor and Galilean. Yet in Peer Gynt 
he declares "to be oneself is to slay oneself." 
Surely all this is not very radical. He wrote to 
Georg Brandes, that the State was the foe of the 
individual; therefore the State must go. But the 
revolution must be one of the spirit. Ibsen ever 
despised socialism, and after his mortification 
over the fiasco of the Paris Commune he had 
never a good word for that vain legend : Liberty, 
Equality, Fraternity. Brandes relates that while 
Ibsen wished — in one of his poems — to place a 
torpedo under the social ark, there was also a 
time when he longed to use the knout on the 
willing slaves of a despised social system. 

Perhaps the main cause of Ibsen's offending 
is his irony. The world forgives much, irony 
328 



IBSEN 

never, for irony is the ivory tower of the intellec- 
tual, the last refuge of the original. It is not the 
intellectual irony of Meredith, nor the playful 
irony of Anatole France, but a veiled corrosive 
irony that causes you to tread suspiciously every 
yard of his dramatic domain. The " second in- 
tention,'' the secondary dialogue, spoken of by 
Maeterlinck, in the Ibsen plays is very discon- 
certing to those who prefer their drama free from 
enigma. Otherwise his dialogue is a model for 
future dramatists. It is clarity itself and, closely 
woven, it has the characteristic accents of nature. 
Read, we feel its gripping logic; spoken by an 
actor, it tingles with vitality. 

For the student there is a fascination in the co- 
hesiveness of these dramas. Ibsen's mind was like 
a lens; it focussed the refracted, scattered, and 
broken lights of opinions and theories of his day 
upon the contracted space of his stage. In a 
fluid state the ideas that crystallised in his prose 
series are to be found in his earliest work; there 
is a remorseless fastening of link to link in the 
march-like movement of his plays. Their au- 
thor seems to delight in battering down in Ghosts 
what he had preached in A Doll's House; The 
Enemy of the People exalted the individual man, 
though Ghosts taught that a certain kind of per- 
sonal liberty is deadly; The Wild Duck, which 
follows, is another puzzle, for in it the misguided 
idealist is pilloried for destroying homes by his 
truth-telling, dangerous tongue; Rosmersholm 
follows with its portrayal of lonely souls; and 
3 2 9 



EGOISTS 

the danger of filling old bottles with the fer- 
menting wines of new ideas is set forth; in The 
Lady from the Sea free-will, the will to love, is 
lauded, though Rebekka West and Rosmersholm 
perished because of their exercise of this same 
will; Hedda Gabler shows the converse of Ellida 
WangePs " will to power.'' Hedda is a creature 
wholly alive and shocking. Ibsen stuns us again, 
for if it is healthy to be individual and to lead 
your own life, in neurasthenic Hedda's case it 
leads to a catastrophe which wrecks a household. 
This game of contradiction is continued in 
The Master-Builder, a most potent exposition 
of human motives. Solness is sick-brained 
because of his loveless egoism. Hilda Wangel, 
the " younger generation," a Hedda Gabler h 
rebours, that he so feared would come knocking 
at his door, awakens in him his dead dreams, 
arouses his slumbering self; curiously enough, if 
the ordinary standards of success be adduced, he 
goes to his destruction when he again climbs the 
dizzy spire. In John Gabriel Borkman the alle- 
gory is clearer. Sacrificing love to a base am- 
bition, to " commercialism," Borkman at the close 
of his great and miserable life discovers that he 
has committed the one unpardonable offence: he 
has slain the love-life in the woman he loved, 
and for the sake of gold. So he is a failure, and, 
like Peer Gynt, he is ready for the Button- 
Moulder with his refuse-heap, who lies in wait 
for all cowardly and incomplete souls. The 
Epilogue returns to the mountains, the Ibsen 
33° 



IBSEN 

symbol of freedom, and there we learn for the 
last time that love is greater than art, that love is 
life. And the dead of life awake. 

The immorality of these plays is so well con- 
cealed that only abnormal moralists detect 
it. It may be admitted that Ibsen, like Shake- 
speare, manifests a preference for the man who 
fails. What is new is the art with which this idea 
is developed. The Ibsen play begins where other 
plays end. The form is the " amplified catastro- 
phe" of Sophocles. After marriage the curtain 
is rung up on the true drama of life, therefore 
marriage is a theme which constantly preoccupies 
this modern poet. He regards it from all sides, ask- 
ing whether " by self-surrender, self-realisation may 
be achieved." His speech delivered once before a 
ladies' club at Christiania proves that he is not 
a champion of latter-day woman's rights. "The 
women will solve the question of mankind, but 
they must do so as mothers." Yet Nora Helmer, 
when she slammed the door of her doll's home, 
caused an echo in the heart of every intelligent 
woman in Christendom. It is not necessary now 
to ask whether a woman would, or should, de- 
sert her children; Nora's departure was only the 
symbol of her liberty, the gesture of a newly 
awakened individuality. Ibsen did not preach 
— as innocent persons of both sexes and all anti- 
Ibsenites believe — that woman should throw over- 
board her duties; this is an absurd construction. 
As well argue that the example of Othello must 
set jealous husbands smothering their wives. A 

33i 



EGOISTS 

Doll's House enacted has caused no more evil 
than Othello. It was the plea for woman as a 
human being, neither more nor less than man, 
which the dramatist made. Our withers must 
have been well wrung, for it aroused a whirlwind 
of wrath, and henceforth the house-key became 
the symbol of feminine supremacy. Yet in his 
lovely drama of pity and resignation, Little Eyolf, 
the tenderest from his pen, the poet set up a coun- 
ter-figure to Nora, demonstrating the duties parents 
owe their children. 

Without exaggeration, he may be said to have 
discovered for the stage the modern woman. No 
longer the sleek cat of the drawing-room, or the 
bayadere of luxury, or the wild outlaw of society, 
the " emancipated' ' Ibsen woman is the sensible 
woman, the womanly woman, bearing a not re- 
mote resemblance to the old-fashioned woman, 
who calmly accepts her share of the burdens and 
responsibilities of life, single or wedded, though 
she insists on her rights as a human being, and 
without a touch of the heroic or the supra-senti- 
mental. Ibsen should not be held responsible 
for the caricatures of womanhood evolved by his 
disciples. When a woman evades her responsi- 
bilities, when she is frivolous or evil, an exponent 
of the " life-lie" in matrimony, then Ibsen grimly 
paints her portrait, and we denounce him as cyn- 
ical for telling the truth. And truth is seldom a 
welcome guest. But he knows that a fiddle can 
be mended and a bell not; and in placing his 
surgeon-like finger on the sorest spot of our social 
3V 



IBSEN 

life, he sounds this bell, and when it rings cracked 
he coldly announces the fact. But his attitude 
toward marriage is not without its mystery. In 
Love's Comedy his hero and heroine part, fear- 
ing the inevitable shipwreck in the union of two 
poetic hearts without the necessary means of a 
prosaic subsistence. In the later plays, marriage 
for gain, for home, for anything but love, brings 
upon its victims the severest consequences; John 
Gabriel Borkman, Hedda, Dora, Mrs. Alving, 
Allmers, Rubek, are examples. The idea of 
man's cruelty to man or woman, or woman's 
cruelty to woman or man, lashes him into a fury. 
Then he becomes Ibsen the Berserker. 

Therefore let us beware the pitfalls dug by some 
Ibsen exegetists; the genius of the dramatist is 
too vast and versatile to be pinned down to a 
single formula. If you believe that he is dangerous 
to young people, let it be admitted — but so are 
Thackeray, Balzac, and Hugo. So is any strong 
thinker. Ibsen is a powerful dissolvent for an 
imagination clogged by theories of life, low ideals, 
and the facile materialism that exalts the letter 
but slays the spirit. He is a foe to compromise, 
a hater of the half-way, the roundabout, the weak- 
willed, above all, a hater of the truckling politician 
— he is a very Torquemada to politicians. At 
the best there is ethical grandeur in his concep- 
tions, and if the moral stress is unduly felt, if he 
tears asunder the veil of our beloved illusions and 
shows us as we are, it is because of his righteous 
indignation against the platitudinous hypocrisy 

333 



EGOISTS 

of modern life. His unvarying code is: "So to 
conduct one's life as to realise oneself." Withal 
an artist, not the evangelist of a new gospel, not 
the social reformer, not the exponent of science 
in the drama. These titles have been thrust 
upon him by his overheated admirers. He never 
posed as a prophet. He is poet, psychologist, 
skald, dramatist, not always a soothsayer. The 
artist in him preserved him from the fate of the 
didactic Tolstoy. With the Russian he shares the 
faculty of emptying souls. Ibsen, who vaguely 
recalls Stendhal in his clear-eyed vision and dry 
irony, is without a trace of the Frenchman's cyni- 
cism or dilettantism. Like all dramatists of the 
first rank, the Norwegian has in him much of the 
seer, yet he always avoided the pontifical tone; he 
may be a sphinx, but he never plays the oracle. 
His categorical imperative, however, "AH or noth- 
ing," does not bear the strain of experience. Life 
is simpler, is not to be lived at such an intolerable 
tension. The very illusions he seeks to destroy 
would be supplanted by others. Man exists be- 
cause of his illusions. Without the " life-lie" he 
would perish in the mire. His illusions are his 
heritage from aeons of ancestors. The classic view 
considered man as the centre of the universe; 
that position has been ruthlessly altered by sci- 
ence — we are now only tiny points of conscious- 
ness in unthinkable space. Isolated then, true 
children of our inconsiderable planet, we have in 
us traces of our predecessors. True, one may be 
disheartened by the pictures of unheroic mean- 

334 



IBSEN 

ness and petty corruption, the ill-disguised in- 
stincts of ape and tiger, in the prose plays, even 
to the extent of calling them — as did M. Mel- 
chior de Vogue, Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet 
— a grotesque Iliad of Nihilism. But we need 
not despair. If Ibsen seemed to say for a period, 
" Evil, be thou my good," his final words in the Epi- 
logue are those of pity and peace : Pax vobiscum! 



II 



This old man with the head and hair of an 
electrified Schopenhauer and the torso of a giant, 
his temperament coinciding with his curt, im- 
perious name, left behind him twenty-six plays, 
one or more in manuscript. A volume of very 
subjective poems concludes this long list; among 
the dramas are at least three of heroic proportion 
and length. Ibsen was born at Skien, Norway, 
1828. His forebears were Danish, German, Scotch, 
and Norwegian. His father, a man of means, 
failed in business, and at the age of eight the little 
Henrik had to face poverty. His schooling was 
of the slightest. He was not much of a classical 
scholar and soon he was apprenticed to an apothe- 
cary at Grimstad, the very name of which evokes 
a vision of gloominess. He did not prove a suc- 
cess as a druggist, as he spent his spare time read- 
ing and caricaturing his neighbours. His verse- 
making was desultory, his accustomed mien an 
unhappy combination of Hamlet and Byron; his 
misanthropy at this period recalls that of the 
335 



EGOISTS 

young Schopenhauer. His favourite reading was 
poetry and history, and he had a predilection for 
sketching and conjuring tricks. It might be 
pointed out that here in the raw were the aptitudes 
of a future dramatist: poetry, pictures, illusion. 
In the year 1850 Ibsen published his first drama, 
derived from poring over Sallust and Cicero. 
It was a creditable effort of youth, and to the 
discerning it promised well for his literary future. 
He was gifted, without doubt, and from the first 
he sounded the tocsin of revolt. Pessimistic and 
rebellious his poems were; he had tasted misery, 
his home was an unhappy one — there was little 
love in it for him — and his earliest memories were 
clustered about the town jail, the hospital, and 
the lunatic asylum. These images were no doubt 
the cause of his bitter and desperate frame of 
mind; grinding poverty, the poverty of a third- 
rate provincial town in Norway, was the climax 
of his misery. And then, too, the scenery, rugged 
and noble, and the climate, depressing for months, 
all had their effect upon his sensitive imagination. 
From the start, certain conceptions of woman 
took root in his mind and reappear in nearly all 
his dramas. Catalina's wife, Aurelia, and the 
vestal Furia, who are reincarnated in the Dagny 
and Hjordis of his Vikings, reappear in A DolPs 
House, Hedda Gabler, and at the last in When We 
Dead Awake. One is the eternal womanly, the 
others the destructive feminine principle, woman 
the conqueror. As Catalina is a rebel against 
circumstances, so are Maja and the sculptor in 

336 



IBSEN 

the Epilogue of 1899. There is almost a half cen- 
tury of uninterrupted composition during which 
this group of men and women disport themselves. 
Brand, a poetic rather than an acting drama, is 
no exception; Brand and the Sheriff, Agnes and 
Gerda. These types are cunningly varied, their 
traits so concealed as to be recognised only after 
careful study. But the characteristics of each 
are alike. The monotony of this procedure is 
redeemed by the unity of conception — Ibsen is 
the reflective poet, the poet who conceives the 
idea and then clothes it, therein differing from 
Shakespeare and Goethe, to whom form and idea 
are simultaneously born. 

In March, 1850, he went to Christiania and 
entered Heltberg's school as a preparation for the 
university. His studies were brief. He became 
involved in a boyish revolutionary outburst — in 
company with his life-long friend, the good- 
hearted Bjornstjerne Bjornson, who helped him 
many times — and while nothing serious occurred, 
it caused the young man to effervesce with literary 
plans and the new ideas of his times. The War- 
rior's Tomb, his second play, was accepted and 
actually performed at the Christiania theatre. 
The author gave up his university dreams and 
began to earn a rude living by his pen. He em- 
barked in newspaper enterprises which failed. 
An extremist politically, he soon made a crop of 
enemies, the wisest crop a strong character can 
raise; but he often worked on an empty stomach 
in consequence. The metal of the man showed 

337 



EGOISTS 

from the first: endure defeat, but no compro- 
mise! He went to Bergen in 185 1 and was ap- 
pointed theatre poet at a small salary; this com- 
prised a travelling stipend. Ibsen saw the Copen- 
hagen and Dresden theatres with excellent results. 
His eyes were opened to the possibilities of his 
craft, and on his return he proved a zealous 
stage manager. He composed, in 1853, St. John's 
Night, which was played at his theatre, and in 
1857 Fru Inger of Oestratt was written. It is 
old-fashioned in form, but singularly life-like in 
characterization and fruitful in situations. The 
story is semi-historical. In the Lady Inger we 
see a foreshadowing of his strong, vengeful 
women. Olaf Liljekrans need not detain us. 
The Vikings (1858) is a sterling specimen of 
drama, in which legend and history are artfully 
blended. The Feast of Solhaug (1857) was very 
successful in its treatment of the saga, and is com- 
paratively cheerful. 

Ibsen left Bergen to take the position of director 
at the Norwegian Theatre, Christiania. He re- 
mained there until 1862, staging all manner of 
plays, from Shakespeare to Scribe. The value 
of these years was incalculable in his technical de- 
velopment. A poet born and by self-discipline 
developed, he was now master of a difficult art, 
an art that later he never lost, even when, weary 
of the conventional comedy of manners, he sought 
to spiritualize the form and give us the psychology 
of commonplace souls. It may be noted that, 
despite the violinist Ole Bull's generous support, 

33* 



IBSEN 

the new theatre endured only five years. More 
than passing stress should be laid upon this forma- 
tive period. His experience of these silent years 
was bitter, but rich in spiritual recompense. 
After some difficulty in securing a paltry pension 
from his government, Ibsen was enabled to leave 
Norway, which had become a charnel-house to 
him since the Danish war with Germany, and with 
his young wife he went to Rome. Thenceforth 
his was a gypsy career. He lived in Rome, in 
Dresden, in Munich, and again in Rome. He 
spent his summers in the Austrian Tyrol, at Sor- 
rento, and occasionally in his own land. His 
was a self-imposed exile, and he did not return to 
Christiania to reside permanently until an old, but 
famous man. Silent, unsociable, a man of harsh 
moods, he was to those who knew him an upright 
character, an ideal husband and father. His 
married life had no history, a sure sign of happi- 
ness, for he was well mated. Yet one feels that, de- 
spite his wealth, his renown, existence was for 
him a via dolorosa. Ever the solitary dreamer, 
he wrote a play about every two or three years, 
and from the very beginning of his exile the effect in 
Norway was like unto the explosion of a bomb- 
shell. Not wasting time in answering his critics, 
it was nevertheless remarked that each new piece 
was a veiled reply to slanderous criticism. 
Ghosts was absolutely intended as an answer to 
the attacks upon A DolPs House; here is what 
Nora would have become if she had been a dutiful 
wife, declares Ibsen, in effect; and we see Mrs. 
339 



EGOISTS 

Alvmg in her motherly agonies. The counter- 
blast to the criticism of Ghosts was An Enemy 
of the People; Dr. Stockman is easily detected 
as a partial portrait of Ibsen. 

Georg Brandes, to whom the poet owes many 
ideas as well as sound criticism, said that early in his 
life a lyric Pegasus had been killed under Ibsen 
This striking hint of his sacrifice is supplemented 
by a letter in which he compared the education 
of a poet to that of a dancing bear. The bear is 
tied in a brewer's vat and a slow fire is built under 
the vat; the wretched animal is then forced to 
dance. Life forces the poet to dance by means 
quite as painful; he dances and the tears roll 
down his cheeks all the while. Ibsen forsook 
poetry for prose and — the dividing line never to 
be recrossed is clearly indicated between Emperor 
and Galilean and The Pillars of Society — he 
bestowed upon his country three specimens of 
his poetic genius. As Italy fructified the genius 
of Goethe, so it touched as with a glowing coal 
the lips of the young Northman. Brand, a noble 
epic, startled and horrified Norway. In Rome 
Ibsen regained his equilibrium. Pie saw his coun- 
try and countrymen more sanely, more steadily, 
though there is a terrible fund of bitterness in this 
dramatic poem. The local politics of Christi- 
ania no longer irritated him, and in the hot, beau- 
tiful South he dreamed of the North, of his be- 
loved fiords and mountains, of ice and avalanche, 
of troll and saga. Luckily for those who have not 
mastered Norwegian, C. H. Herford's transla- 
34o 



IBSEN 

tion of Brand exists, and, while the translator de- 
plores his sins of omission, it is a work — as are 
the English versions of the prose plays by William 
Archer — that gives one an excellent idea of the 
original. In Brand (1866) Ibsen is at his furthest 
extremity from compromise. This clergyman 
sacrifices his mother, his wife, his child, his own 
life, to a frosty ideal: "All or nothing." He is 
implacable in his ire against worldliness, in his 
contempt of churchmen that believe in half-way 
measures. He perishes on the heights as a voice 
proclaims, "He is the God of Love." Greatly 
imaginative, charged with spiritual spleen and 
wisdom, Brand at once placed Ibsen among the 
mighty. 

He followed it with a new Odyssey of his soul, 
the amazing Peer Gynt (1867), in which his hu- 
mour, hitherto a latent quality, his fantasy, bold 
invention, and the poetic evocation of the faithful, 
exquisite Solveig, are further testimony to his 
breadth of resource. Peer Gynt is all that Brand 
was not: whimsical, worldly, fantastic, weak- 
willed, not so vicious as perverse; he is very sel- 
fish, one who was to himself sufficient, therefore 
a failure. The will, if it frees, may also kill. It 
killed the soul of Peer. There are pages of un- 
flagging humour, poetry, and observation; scene 
dissolves into scene; Peer travels over half the 
earth, is rich, is successful, is poor; and at the 
end meets the Button-Moulder, that ironical 
shadow who tells him what he has become. We 
hear the Boyg, the spirit of compromise, with its 
34i 



EGOISTS 

huge, deadly, coiling lengths, gruffly bid Peer to 
"go around." Facts of life are to be slunk about, 
never to be faced. Peer comes to harbour in the 
arms of his deserted Solveig. The resounding 
sarcasm, the ferociousness of the attack on all 
the idols of the national cavern, raised a storm in 
Norway that did not abate for years. Ibsen was 
again a target for the bolts of critical and public 
hatred. Peer Gynt is the Scandinavian Faust. 

Having purged his soul of this perilous stuff, 
the poet, in 1873, finished his double drama 
Emperor and Galilean, not a success dramatically, 
but a strong, interesting work for the library, 
though it saw the footlights at Berlin, Leipsic, 
and Christiania. The apostate Emperor Julian 
is the protagonist. We discern Ibsen the mystic 
philosopher longing for his Third Kingdom. 

After a silence of four years The Pillars of 
Society appeared. Like its predecessor in the 
same genre, The Young Men's League, it is a 
prose drama, a study of manners, and a scathing 
arraignment of civic dishonesty. All the rancour 
of its author against the bourgeois hypocrisy of his 
countrymen comes to the surface; as in The 
Young Men's League the vacillating nature of the 
shallow politician is laid bare. It seems a trifle 
banal now, though the canvas is large, the figures 
animated. One recalls Augier without his Gallic 
esprit, rather than the later Ibsen. A Doll's 
House was once a household word, as was Ghosts 
(188 1). There is no need now to retell the story 
of either play. Ghosts, in particular, has an an- 
342 



IBSEN 

tique quality, the denouement leaves us shivering. 
It may be set down as the strongest play of the 
nineteenth century, and also the most harrowing. 
Its intensity borders on the hallucinatory. We 
involuntarily recall the last act of Tristan and 
Isolde or the final movement of Tschaikowsky's 
Pathetic symphony. It is the shrill discord be- 
tween the mediocre creatures involved and the 
ghastly punishment meted out to the innocent that 
agitates and depresses us. Here are human souls 
illuminated as if by a lightning flash; we long for 
the anticipated thunder. It does not sound. 
The drama ends in silence — one of those pauses 
(Ibsen employs the* pause as does a musical com- 
poser) which leaves the spectator unstrung. The 
helpless sense of hovering about the edge of a 
bottomless gulf is engendered by this play. No 
man could have written it but Ibsen, and we hope 
that no man will ever attempt a parallel perform- 
ance, for such art modulates across the borderland 
of the pathologic. 

The Wild Duck (1884) followed An Enemy of 
the People (1882). It is the most puzzling of 
the prose dramas except The Master-Builder, 
for in it Ibsen deliberately mocks himself and his 
ideals. It is, nevertheless, a profoundly human 
and moving work. Gina Ekdal, the wholesome, 
sensible wife of Ekdal, the charlatan photographer 
— a revenant of Peer Gynt — has been called a 
feminine Sancho Panza. Gregers Werle, the 
meddlesome truth-teller; Relling — a sardonic 
incarnation of the author — who believes in feed- 

343 



EGOISTS 

bound while the souls he has created by his black 
art slowly betray themselves. It may be said 
that all this is not the art of the normal theatre. 
Very true. It more nearly resembles a dramatic 
confessional with a hidden auditory bewitched 
into listening to secrets never suspected of the 
humanity that hedges us about in street or home. 
Ibsen is clairvoyant. He takes the most familiar 
material and holds it in the light of his imagina- 
tion; straightway we see a new world, a northern 
dance of death, like the ferocious pictures of his 
fellow-countryman, the painter Edvard Munch. 

Little Eyolf (1894) is fairly plain reading, with 
some fine overtones of suffering and self-abnega- 
tion. Its lesson is wholly satisfying. John 
Gabriel Borkman (1896), written at an age when 
most poets show declining power, is another 
monument to the vigour and genius of Ibsen. 
The story winds about the shattered career of 
a financier. There is a secondary plot, in which 
the parental curses come home to roost — the 
son, carefully reared to wipe away the stain from 
his father's name, prefers Paris and a rollicking 
life. The desolation under this roof-tree is al- 
most epical: two sisters in deadly antagonism, a 
blasted man, the old wolf, whose footfalls in the 
chamber above become absolutely sinister as 
the play progresses, are made to face the hard 
logic of their misspent lives. The doctrine of 
compensation has never had such an exponent as 
Ibsen. 

In the last of his published plays, When We 
346 



IBSEN 

Dead Awake (1899), we find earlier and familiar 
themes developed at moments with contrapuntal 
mastery. Rubek, the sculptor, has aroused a 
love that he never dared to face. He married the 
wrong woman. His early dream, the inspiration 
of his master work, he has lost. His art withers. 
And when he meets his Irene, her mind is full of 
wandering ghosts. To the heights, to the same 
peaks that Brand climbed, they both must mount, 
and there they are destroyed, as was Brand, by 
an avalanche. Eros is the triumphant god of the 
aged magician. 



Ill 



It must be apparent to those who have not 
read or seen the Ibsen plays that, despite this 
huddled and foreshortened account, they are in 
essence quite different from what has been re- 
ported of them. Idealistic, symbolistic, moral, 
and ennobling, the Ibsen drama was so vilified 
by malice and ignorance that its very name was 
a portent of evil. Mad or wicked Ibsen is not. 
His scheme of life and morals is often oblique 
and paradoxical, his interpretation of truths so 
elliptical that we are confused. But he is es- 
sentially sound. He believes in the moral con- 
tinuity of the universe. His astounding energy is 
a moral energy. Salvation by good works is his 
burden. The chief thing is to be strong in your 
faith. He despises the weak, not the strong sin- 
ner. His Supermen are the bankrupts of ro- 

347 



EGOISTS 

mantic heroism. His strong man is frequently 
wrong-headed; but the weakling works the real 
mischief. Never admit you are beaten. Begin 
at the bottom twenty times, and when the top is 
achieved die, or else look for loftier peaks to 
climb. Ibsen exalts strength. His "ice-church" 
is chilly; the lungs drink in with difficulty the 
buffeting breezes on his heights; yet how bra- 
cing, how inspiring, is this austere place of wor- 
ship. Bad as is mankind, Ibsen, who was ever 
in advance of his contemporaries, believed in its 
possibility for betterment. Here the optimist 
speaks. Brand's spiritual pride is his downfall; 
nevertheless, Ibsen, an aristocratic thinker, be- 
lieves that of pride one cannot have too much. 
He recognised the selfish and hollow foundation 
of all "humanitarian" movements. He is a 
sign-post for the twentieth century when the 
aristocratic of spirit must enter into combat with 
the herd instinct of a depressing socialism. His 
influence has been tremendous. His plays teem 
with the general ideas of his century. His chief 
value lies in the beauty of his art; his is the rare 
case of the master-singer rounding a long life with 
his master works. He brought to the theatre new 
ideas; he changed forever the dramatic map of 
Europe; he originated a new method of surpri- 
sing life, capturing it and forcing it to give up a 
moiety of its mystery for the uses of a difficult and 
recondite art. He fashioned character anew. And 
he pushed resolutely into the mist that surrounded 
the human soul, his Diogenes lantern glimmering, 
348 



IBSEN 

his brave, lonely heart undaunted by the silence 
and the solitude. His message ? Who shall say ? 
He asks questions, and, patterning after nature, 
he seldom answers them. When his ideas sicken 
and die — he asserted that the greatest truth 
outlives its usefulness in time, and it may not be 
denied that his drama is a dissolvent; already 
the early plays are in historical twilight and the 
woman question of his day is for us something 
quite different — his art will endure. Henrik 
Ibsen was a man of heroic fortitude. His plays 
are a bold and stimulating spectacle for the spirit. 
Should we ask more of a dramatic poet ? 



349 



X 

MAX STIRNER 



In 1888 John Henry Mackay, the Scottish- 
German poet, while at the British Museum read- 
ing Lange's History of Materialism, encountered 
the name of Max Stirner and a brief criticism of 
his forgotten book, Der Einzige und sein Eigen- 
thum (The Only One and His Property; in French 
translated L'Unique et sa Propriete, and in the 
first English translation more aptly and euphoni- 
ously entitled The Ego and His Own). His curi- 
osity excited, Mackay, who is an anarchist, pro- 
cured after some difficulty a copy of the work, 
and so greatly was he stirred that for ten years 
he gave himself up to the study of Stirner and 
his teachings, and after incredible painstaking 
published in 1898 the story of his life. (Max 
Stirner: Sein Leben und sein Werk: John Henry 
Mackay.) To Mackay's labours we owe all we 
know of a man who was as absolutely swallowed 
up by the years as if he had never existed. But 
some advanced spirits had read Stirner's book, 
the most revolutionary ever written, and had felt 
35o 



MAX STIRNER 

its influence. Let us name two: Henrik Ibsen 
and Frederick Nietzsche. Though the name of 
Stirner is not quoted by Nietzsche, he neverthe- 
less recommended Stirner to a favourite pupil of 
his, Professor Baumgartner at Basel University. 
This was in 1874. 

One hot August afternoon in the year 1896 at 
Bayreuth, I was standing in the Marktplatz when 
a member of the Wagner Theatre pointed out to 
me a house opposite, at the corner of the Maxi- 
milianstrasse, and said: "Do you see that house 
with the double gables? A man was born there 
whose name will be green when Jean Paul and 
Richard Wagner are forgotten." It was too large 
a draught upon my credulity, so I asked the name. 
"Max Stirner," he replied. "The crazy Hegel- 
ian," I retorted. "You have read him, then?" 
"No; but you haven't read Nordau." It was 
true. All fire and flame ai that time for Nietzsche, 
I did not realise that the poet and rhapsodist had 
forerunners. My friend sniffed at Nietzsche's 
name; Nietzsche for him was an aristocrat, not 
an Individualist — in reality, a lyric expounder 
of Bismarck's gospel of blood and iron. Wag- 
ner's adversary would, with Renan, place man- 
kind under the yoke of a more exacting tyranny 
than Socialism, the tyranny of Culture, of the 
Superman. Ibsen, who had studied both Kier- 
kegaard and Stirner — witness Brand and Peer 
Gynt — Ibsen was much nearer to the champion 
of the Ego than Nietzsche. Yet it is the dithy- 
rambic author of Zarathustra who is responsible, 
35i 



EGOISTS 

with Mackay, for the recrudescence of Stirner's 
teachings. 

Nietzsche is the poet of the doctrine, Stirner its 
prophet, or, if you will, its philosopher. Later 
I secured the book, which had been reprinted in 
the cheap edition of Reclam (1882). It seemed 
colourless, or rather gray, set against the glory 
and gorgeous rhetoric of Nietzsche. I could not 
see then what I saw a decade later — that Nietz- 
sche had used Stirner as a springboard, as a point 
of departure, and that the Individual had vastly 
different meanings to those diverse temperaments. 
But Stirner displayed the courage of an explorer 
in search of the north pole of the Ego. 

The man whose theories would make a tabula 
rasa of civilisation, was born at Bayreuth, Oc- 
tober 25, 1806, and died at Berlin June 25, 1856. 
His right name was Johann Caspar Schmidt, 
Max Stirner being a nickname bestowed upon 
him by his lively comrades in Berlin because of 
his very high and massive forehead. His father 
was a maker of wind instruments, who died six 
months after his son's birth. His mother re- 
married, and his stepfather proved a kind pro- 
tector. Nothing of external importance occurred 
in the life of Max Stirner that might place him 
apart from his fellow-students. He was very 
industrious over his books at Bayreuth, and when 
he became a student at the Berlin University he 
attended the lectures regularly, preparing him- 
self for a teacher's profession. He mastered the 
classics, modern philosophy, and modern lan- 
352 



MAX STIRNER 

guages. But he did not win a doctor's degree; 
just before examinations his mother became ill 
^with a mental malady (a fact his critics have noted) 
and the son dutifully gave up everything so as to 
be near her. After her death he married a girl 
who died within a short time. Later, in 1843, his 
second wife was Marie Dahnhardt, a very " ad- 
vanced'' young woman, who came from Schwe- 
rin to Berlin to lead a "free" life. She met 
Stirner in the Hippel circle, at a Weinstube in 
the Friedrichstrasse, where radical young think- 
ers gathered: Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Karl 
Marx, Moses Hess, Jordan, Julius Faucher, and 
other stormy insurgents. She had, it is said, 
about 10,000 thalers. She was married with the 
ring wrenched from a witness's purse — her 
bridegroom had forgotten to provide one. He 
was not a practical man; if he had been he would 
hardly have written The Ego and His Own. 

It was finished between the years 1843 an d 1845; 
the latter date it was published. It created a stir, 
though the censor did not seriously interfere with 
it; its attacks on the prevailing government were 
veiled. In Germany rebellion on the psychic plane 
expresses itself in metaphysics; in Poland and 
Russia music is the safer medium. Feuerbach, 
Hess, and Szeliga answered Stirner's terrible ar- 
raignment of society, but men's thoughts were 
interested elsewhere, and with the revolt of 1848 
Stirner was quite effaced. He had taught for 
five years in a fashionable school for young ladies; 
he had written for several periodicals, and trans- 

353 



EGOISTS 

lated extracts from the works of Say and Adam 
Smith. 

After his book appeared, his relations with his 
wife became uneasy. Late in 1846 or early in 
^ 1847 s he left him and went to London, where she 
supported herself by writing; later she inherited 
a small sum from a sister, visited Australia, mar- 
ried a labourer there, and became a washerwoman. 
In 1897 Mackay wrote to her in London, asking 
her for some facts in the life of her husband. 
She replied tartly that she was not willing to re- 
vive her past; that her husband had been too 
much of an egotist to keep friends, and was 
"very sly." This was all he could extort from 
the woman, who evidently had never understood 
her husband and execrated his memory, probably 
because her little fortune was swallowed up by 
their mutual improvidence. Another appeal only 
elicited the answer that "Mary Smith is preparing 
for death" — she had become a Roman Catholic. 
It is the irony of things in general that his book 
is dedicated to "My Sweetheart, Marie Dahn- 
hardt." 

Stirner, after being deserted, led a precarious 
existence. The old jolly crowd at HippePs sel- 
dom saw him. He was in prison twice for debt 
— free Prussia — and often lacked bread. He, 
the exponent of Egoism, of philosophic anarchy, 
starved because of his pride. He was in all mat- 
ters save his theories a moderate man, eating and 
drinking temperately, living frugally. Unas- 
suming in manners, he could hold his own in de- 
354 



MAX STIRNER 

bate — and HippePs appears to have been a rude 
debating society — yet one who avoided life rather 
than mastered it. He was of medium height, 
ruddy, and his eyes deep-blue. His hands were 
white, slender, " aristocratic," writes Mackay. 
Certainly not the figure of a stalwart shatterer of 
conventions, not the ideal iconoclast; above all, 
without a touch of the melodrama of communistic 
anarchy, with its black flags, its propaganda by 
force, its idolatry of assassinations, bomb-throw- 
ing, killing of fat, harmless policemen, and its 
sentimental gabble about Fraternity. Stirner hated 
the word Equality; he knew it was a lie, knew that 
all men are born unequal, as no two grains of 
sand on earth ever are or ever will be alike. He 
was a solitary. And thus he died at the age of 
fifty. A few of his former companions heard of 
his neglected condition and buried him. Nearly 
a half century later Mackay, with the co-operation 
of Hans von Btilow, affixed a commemorative tab- 
let on the house where he last lived, Phillipstrasse 
19, Berlin, and alone Mackay placed a slab to 
mark his grave in the Sophienkirchhof. 

It is to the poet of the Letzte Erkentniss, with 
its stirring line, "Doch bin ich mein," that I owe 
the above scanty details of the most thorough- 
going Nihilist who ever penned his disbelief in 
religion, humanity, society, the family. He rejects 
them all. We have no genuine portrait of this in- 
surrectionist — he preferred personal insurrec- 
tion to general revolution; the latter, he asserted, 
brought in its train either Socialism or a tyrant — 

355 



EGOISTS 

except a sketch hastily made by Friedrich Engels, 
the revolutionist, for Mackay. It is not reas- 
suring. Stirner looks like an old-fashioned Ger- 
man and timid pedagogue, high coat-collar, spec- 
tacles, clean-shaven face, and all. This valiant 
enemy of the State, of socialism, was, perhaps, 
only brave on paper. But his icy, relentless, epi- 
grammatic style is in the end more gripping than 
the spectacular, volcanic, whirling utterances of 
Nietzsche. Nietzsche lives in an ivory tower 
and is an aristocrat. Into Stirner's land all are 
welcome. That is, if men have the will to rebel, 
and if they despise the sentimentality of mob 
rule. The Ego and His Own is the most drastic 
criticism of socialism thus far presented. 



II 



For those who love to think of the visible uni- 
verse as a cosy corner of God's footstool, there is 
something bleak and terrifying in the isolated posi- 
tion of man since science has postulated him as 
an infinitesimal bubble on an unimportant planet. 
The soul shrinks as our conception of outer space 
widens. Thomas Hardy describes the sensation 
as " ghastly." There is said to be no purpose, 
no design in all the gleaming phantasmagoria re- 
vealed by the astronomer's glass; while on our 
globe we are a brother to lizards, bacteria furnish 
our motor force, and our brain is but a subtly 
fashioned mirror, composed of neuronic filaments, 
a sort of " darkroom" in which is somehow pictured 
356 



MAX STIRNER 

the life without. Well, we admit, for the sake of 
the argument, that we banish God from the firma- 
ment, substituting a superior mechanism; we 
admit our descent from star-dust and apes, we 
know that we have no free will, because man, like 
the unicellular organisms, " gives to every stimu- 
lus without an inevitable response." That, of 
course, settles all moral obligations. But we 
had hoped, we of the old sentimental brigade, 
that all things being thus adjusted we could live 
with our fellow man in (comparative) peace, 
cheating him only in a legitimate business way, 
and loving our neighbour better than ourselves 
(in public). Ibsen had jostled our self-satisfac- 
tion sadly, but some obliging critic had discov- 
ered his formula — a pessimistic decadent — and 
with bare verbal bones we worried the old white- 
haired mastiff of Norway. Only a decadent! 
It is an easy word to speak and it means nothing. 
With Nietzsche the case was simpler. We couldn't 
read him because he was a madman; but he at 
least was an aristocrat who held the bourgeois in 
contempt, and he also held a brief for culture. 
Ah! when we are young we are altruists; as 
Thackeray says, " Youths go to balls; men go to 
dinners." 

But along comes this dreadful Stirner, who 
cries out: Hypocrites all of you. You are not 
altruists, but selfish persons, who, self-illuded, 
believe yourselves to be disinterested. Be Ego- 
ists. Confess the truth in the secrecy of your 
mean, little souls. We are all Egotists. Be 

357 



EGOISTS 

Egoists. There is no truth but my truth. No 
world but my world. I am I. And then Stirner 
waves away God, State, society, the family, morals, 
mankind, leaving only the "hateful" Ego. The 
cosmos is frosty and inhuman, and old Mother 
Earth no longer offers us her bosom as a reclining- 
place. Stirner has so decreed it. We are sus- 
pended between heaven and earth, like Ma- 
homet's coffin, hermetically sealed in Self. In- 
stead of "smiting the chord of self," we must 
reorchestrate the chord that it may give out richer 
music. (Perhaps the Higher Egoism which often 
leads to low selfishness.) 

Nevertheless, there is an honesty in the words 
of Max Stirner. We are weary of the crying in 
the market-place, "Lo! Christ is risen," only 
to find an old nostrum tricked out in socialistic 
phrases; and fine phrases make fine feathers for 
these gentlemen who offer the millennium in 
one hand and perfect peace in the other. Stirner 
is the frankest thinker of his century. He does 
not soften his propositions, harsh ones for most 
of us, with promises, but pursues his thought with 
ferocious logic to its covert. There is no such 
hybrid with him a$ Christian Socialism, no 
dodging issues. He is a Teutonic Childe Roland 
who to the dark tower comes, but instead of blow- 
ing his horn — as Nietzsche did — he blows up 
the tower itself. Such an iconoclast has never be- 
fore put pen to paper. He is so sincere in his 
scorn of all we hold dear that he is refreshing. 
Nietzsche's flashing epigrammatic blade often 

358 



MAX STIRNER 

snaps after it is fleshed; the grim, cruel Stirner, after 
he makes a jab at his opponent, twists the steel in 
the wound. Having no mercy for himself, he 
has no mercy for others. He is never a hypocrite. 
He erects no altars to known or unknown gods. 
Humanity, he says, has become the Moloch to- 
day to which everything is sacrificed. Humanity 
— that is, the State, perhaps, even the socialistic 
state (the most terrible yoke of all for the indi- 
vidual soul). This assumed love of humanity, 
this sacrifice of our own personality, are the 
blights of modern life. The Ego has too long 
been suppressed by ideas, sacred ideas of religion, 
state, family, law, morals. The conceptual ques- 
tion, "What is Man?" must be changed to "Who 
is Man?" I am the owner of my might, and I 
am so when I know myself as unique. 

Stirner is not a communist — so long con- 
founded with anarchs — he does not believe in 
force. That element came into the world with 
the advent of Bakounine and Russian nihilism. 
Stirner would replace society by groups; property 
would be held, money would be a circulating 
medium; the present compulsory system would 
be voluntary instead of involuntary. Unlike his 
great contemporary, Joseph Proudhon, Stirner 
is not a constructive philosopher. Indeed, he is 
no philosopher. A moralist (or immoralist), an 
Ethiker, his book is a defence of Egoism, of the 
submerged rights of the Ego, and in these piping 
times of peace and fraternal humbug, when every 
nation, every man embraces his neighbour pre- 

359 



EGOISTS 

paratory to disembowelling him in commerce or 
war, Max Stirner's words are like a trumpet-blast. 
And many Jericho-built walls go down before 
these ringing tones. His doctrine is the Fourth 
Dimension of ethics. That his book will be more 
s dangerous than a million bombs, if misappre- 
hended, is no reason why it should not be read. 
Its author can no more be held responsible for its 
misreading than the orthodox faiths for their 
backsliders. Nietzsche has been wofully mis- 
understood; Nietzsche, the despiser of mob rule, 
has been acclaimed a very Attila — instead of 
which he is a culture-philosopher, one who in- 
sists that reform must be first spiritual. Indi- 
vidualism for him means only an end to culture. 
Stirner is not a metaphysician; he is too much 
realist. He is really a topsy-turvy Hegelian, a 
political pyrrhonist. His Ego is his Categorical 
Imperative. And if the Individual loses his value, 
what is his raison d'etre lor existence? What 
shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world 
but loses his own Ego? Make your value felt, 
cries Stirner. The minority may occasionally err, 
but the majority is always in the wrong. Egoism 
must not be misinterpreted as petty selfishness or as 
an excuse to do wrong. Life will be ennobled and 
sweeter if we respect ourselves. " There is no 
sinner and no sinful egoism. . . . Do not call 
men sinful; and they are not" Freedom is not 
a goal. "Free — from what? Oh! what is 
there that cannot be shaken off? The yoke of 
serfdom, of sovereignty, of aristocracy and princes, 

360 



MAX STIRNER 

the dominion of the desires and passions; yes, 
even the dominion of one's own will, of self-will, 
for the completest self-denial is nothing but free- 
dom — freedom, to wit, from self-determination, 
from one's own self." This has an ascetic tang, 
and indicates that to compass our complete Ego 
the road travelled will be as thorny as any saint's 
of old. Where does Woman come into this 
scheme? There is no Woman, only a human 
Ego. Humanity is a convenient fiction to harry 
the individualist. So, society, family are the 
clamps that compress the soul of woman. If 
woman is to be free she must first be an individual, 
an Ego. In America, to talk of female suffrage 
is to propound the paradox of the masters at- 
tacking their slaves; yet female suffrage might 
prove a good thing — it might demonstrate the 
reductio ad absurdum of the administration of the 
present ballot system. 

Our wail over our neighbour's soul is simply 
the wail of a busybody. Mind your own busi- 
ness! is the pregnant device of the new Egoism. 
Puritanism is not morality, but a psychic disorder. 

Stirner, in his way, teaches that the Kingdom 
of God is within you. That man will ever be 
sufficiently perfected to become his own master 
is a dreamer's dream. Yet let us dream it. At 
least by that road we make for righteousness. 
But let us drop all cant about brotherly love and 
self-sacrifice. Let us love ourselves (respect our 
Ego), that we may learn to respect our brother; 
self-sacrifice means doing something that we be- 
361 



EGOISTS 

lieve to be good for our souls, therefore egotism 
— the higher egotism, withal egotism. As for 
going to the people — the Russian phrase — let 
the people forget themselves as a collective body, 
tribe, or group, and each man and woman develop 
his or her Ego. In Russia " going to the people" 
may have been sincere — in America it is a trick 
to catch, not souls, but votes. 

"The time is not far distant when it will be 
impossible for any proud, free, independent 
spirit to call himself a socialist, since he would be 
classed with those wretched toadies and worship- 
pers of success who even now lie on their knees 
before every workingman and lick his hands simply 
because he is a workingman." 

John Henry Mackay spoke these words in a 
book of his. Did not Campanella, in an unfor- 
gettable sonnet, sing, "The people is a beast of 
muddy brain that knows not its own strength. 
. . . With its own hands it ties and gags itself"? 



Ill 



The Ego and His Own is divided into two 
parts: first, The Man; second, I. Its motto 
should be, "I find no sweeter fat than sticks to 
my own bones." But Walt Whitman's pro- 
nouncement had not been made, and Stirner was 
forced to fall back on Goethe — Goethe, the 
grand Immoralist of his epoch, wise and wicked 
Goethe, from whom flows all that is modern. "I 
place my all on Nothing" ("Ich hab' Mein Sach' 
362 



MAX STIRNER 

auf Nichts gestellt," in the joyous poem Vani- 
tas! Vanitatum Vanitas!) is Stirner' s keynote to 
his Egoistic symphony. The hateful I, as Pascal 
called it, caused Zola, a solid egotist himself , to assert 
that the English were the most egotistic of races 
because their I in their tongue was but a single 
letter, while the French employed two, and not 
capitalised unless beginning a sentence. Stirner 
must have admired the English, as his I was the 
sole counter in his philosophy. His Ego and not 
the family is the unit of the social life. In an- 
tique times, when men were really the young, 
not the ancient, it was a world of reality. Men 
enjoyed the material. With Christianity came 
the rule of the spirit; ideas were become sacred, 
with the concepts of God, Goodness, Sin, Sal- 
vation. After Rousseau and the French Revo- 
lution humanity was enthroned, and the State 
became our oppressor. Our first enemies are 
our parents, our educators. It follows, then, 
that the only criterion of life is my Ego. With- 
out my Ego I could not apprehend existence. 
Altruism is a pretty disguise for egotism. No 
one is or can be disinterested. He gives up one 
thing for another because the other seems better, 
nobler to him. Egotism! The ascetic renounces 
the pleasures of life because in his eyes renuncia- 
tion is nobler than enjoyment. Egotism again! 
"You are to benefit yourself, and you are not to 
seek your benefit," cries Stirner. Explain the 
paradox! The one sure thing of life is the Ego. 
Therefore, "I am not you, but I'll use you if you 
363 



EGOISTS 

are agreeable to me." Not to God, not to man, 
must be given the glory. "I'D keep the glory 
myself." What is Humanity but an abstraction? 
I am Humanity. Therefore the State is a monster 
that devours its children. It must not dictate to 
me. "The State and I are enemies.' ' The 
State is a spook. A spook, too, is freedom. 
What is freedom? Who is free? The world 
belongs to all, but all are /. I alone am individ- 
ual proprietor. 

Property is conditioned by might. What I 
have is mine. "Whoever knows how to take, to 
defend, the thing, to him belongs property." 
Stirner would have held that property was not 
only nine but ten points of the law. This is 
Pragmatism with a vengeance. He repudiates 
all laws; repudiates competition, for persons are 
not the subject of competition, but "things" are; 
therefore if you are without "things" how can you 
compete? Persons are free, not "things." The 
world, therefore, is not "free." Socialism is but 
a further screwing up of the State machine to 
limit the individual. Socialism is a new god, a 
new abstraction to tyrannise over the Ego. And 
remember that Stirner is not speaking of the 
metaphysical Ego of Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, 
but of your I, my I, the political, the social I, the 
economic I of every man and woman. Stirner 
spun no metaphysical cobwebs. He reared no 
lofty cloud palaces. He did not bring from Asia 
its pessimism, as did Schopenhauer; nor deny 
reality, as did Berkeley. He was a foe to general 
3 6 4 



MAX STIRNER 

ideas. He was an implacable realist. Yet while 
he denies the existence of an Absolute, of a Deity, 
State, Categorical Imperative, he nevertheless 
had not shaken himself free from Hegelianism 
(he is Extreme Left as a Hegelian), for he erected 
his I as an Absolute, though only dealing with 
it in its relations to society. Now, nature abhors 
an absolute. Everything is relative. So we 
shall see presently that with Stirner, too, his I 
is not so independent as he imagines. 

He says " crimes spring from fixed ideas." The 
Church, State, the Family, Morals, are fixed< ideas. 
"Atheists are pious people." They reject one 
fiction only to cling to many old ones. Liberty for 
the people is not my liberty. Socrates was a fool 
in that he conceded to the Athenians the right to 
condemn him. Proudhon said (rather, Brisson 
before him), "Property is theft." Theft from 
whom? From society? But society is not the 
sole proprietor. Pauperism is the valuelessness 
of Me. The State and pauperism are the same. 
Communism, Socialism abolish private property 
and push us back into Collectivism. The indi- 
vidual is enslaved by the machinery of the State 
or by socialism. Your Ego is not free if you al- 
low your vices or virtues to enslave it. The in- 
tellect has too long ruled, says Stirner; it is the will 
(not Schopenhauer's Will to Live, or Nietzsche's 
Will to Power, but the sum of our activity ex- 
pressed by an act of volition; old-fashioned will, 
in a word) to exercise itself to the utmost. Noth- 
ing compulsory, all voluntary. Do what you will. 

365 



EGOISTS 

Fay ce que vouldras, as Rabelais has it in his Abbey 
of Theleme. Not "Know thyself/' but get the 
value out of yourself. Make your value felt. 
The poor are to blame for the rich. Our art to- 
day is the only art possible, and therefore real 
at the time. We are at every moment all we can 
be. There is no such thing as sin. It is an in- 
vention to keep imprisoned the will of our Ego. 
And as mankind is forced to believe theoretically 
in the evil of sin, yet commit it in its daily life, 
hypocrisy and crime are engendered. If the con- 
cept of sin had never been used as a club over the 
weak-minded, there would be no sinners — i.e., 
wicked people. The individual is himself the 
world's history. The world is my picture. There 
is no other Ego but mine. Louis XIV. said, 
" L'Etat, c'est moi"\ I say, "V Univers, c'est moi." 
John Stuart Mill wrote in his famous essay on 
liberty that "Society has now got the better of the 
individual." 

Rousseau is to blame for the "Social Contract" 
and the "Equality" nonsense that has poisoned 
more than one nation's political ideas. The 
minority is always in the right, declared Ibsen, 
as opposed to Comte's "Submission is the base 
of perfection." "Liberty means responsibility. 
That is why most men dread it" (Bernard Shaw). 
"Nature does not seem to have made man for 
independence" (Vauvenargues). "What can 
give a man liberty? Will, his own will, and it 
gives power, which is better than liberty" (Tur- 
genev). To have the will to be responsible for 

3 66 



MAX STIRNER 

one's self, advises Nietzsche. "I am what I am" 
(Brand). "To thyself be sufficient" (Peer 
Gynt). Both men failed, for their freedom kills. 
To thine own self be true. God is within you. 
Best of all is Lord Acton's dictum that "Liberty 
is not a means to a higher political end. It is 
of itself the highest political end." To will is 
to have to will (Ibsen). My truth is the truth 
(Stirner). Mortal has made the immortal, says 
the Rig Veda. Nothing is greater than I (Bha 
gavat Gita). I am that I am (the Avesta, also 
Exodus). Taine wrote, "Nature is in reality a 
tapestry of which we see the reverse side. This 
is why we try to turn it." Hierarchy, oligarchy, 
both forms submerge the Ego. J. S. Mill 
demanded: "How can great minds be produced 
in a country where the test of a great mind is agree- 
ing in the opinions of small minds?" Bakou- 
nine in his fragmentary essay on God and the 
State feared the domination of science quite as 
much as an autocracy. "Politics is the madness 
of the many for the gain of the few," Pope asserted. 
Read Spinoza, The Citizen and the State (Tracta- 
tus Theologico-Politicus). Or Oscar Wilde's 
epigram: "Charity creates a multitude of sins." 
"I am not poor enough to give alms," says Nietz- 
sche. But Max Beerbohm has wittily said — and 
his words contain as much wisdom as wit — that 
"If he would have his ideas realised, the Socialist 
must first kill the Snob." 

Science tells us that our / is really a We; a 
colony of cells, an orchestra of inherited instincts. 

367 



EGOISTS 

We have not even free will, or at least only in 
a limited sense. We are an instrument played 
upon by our heredity and our environment. The 
cell, then, is the unit, not the Ego. Very well, 
S timer would exclaim (if he had lived after Darwin 
and 1859), the cell is my cell, not yours! Away 
with other cells! But such an autonomous gospel 
is surely a phantasm. Stirner saw a ghost. He, 
too, in his proud Individualism was an aristocrat. 
No man may separate himself from the tradition 
of his race unless to incur the penalty of a sterile 
isolation. The solitary is the abnormal man. 
Man is gregarious. Man is a political animal. 
Even Stirner recognises that man is not man 
without society. 

In practice he would not have agreed with 
Havelock Ellis that "all the art of living lies in 
the fine mingling of letting go and holding on." 
Stirner, sentimental, henpecked, myopic Berlin 
professor, was too actively engaged in wholesale 
criticism — that is, destruction of society, with 
all its props and standards, its hidden selfishness 
and heartlessness — to bother with theories of 
reconstruction. His disciples have remedied the 
omission. In the United States, for example, 
Benjamin R. Tucker, a follower of Josiah War- 
ren, teaches a practical and philosophical form 
of Individualism. He is an Anarch who believes 
in passive resistance. Stirner speaks, though 
vaguely, of a Union of Egoists, a Verein, where all 
would rule all, where man, through self-mastery, 
would be his own master. ("In those days there 
368 



MAX STIRNER 

was no king in Israel; every man did that which 
was right in his own eyes.") Indeed, his 
notions as to Property and Money — "it will al- 
ways be money" — sound suspiciously like those 
of our "captains of industry." Might conquers 
Right. He has brought to bear the most bla- 
zing light-rays upon the shifts and evasions of 
those who decry Egoism, who are what he calls 
"involuntary," not voluntary, egotists. Their 
motives are shown to the bone. Your Sir Wil- 
loughby Patternes are not real Egoists, but only 
half-hearted, selfish weaklings. The true egotist 
is the altruist, says Stirner; yet Leibnitz was right; 
so was Dr. Pangloss. This is the best of possible 
worlds. Any other is not conceivable for man, 
who is at the top of his zoological series. (Though 
Quinton has made the statement that birds 
followed the mammal.) We are all "spectres 
of the dust," and to live on an overcrowded 
planet we must follow the advice of the Boyg: 
"Go roundabout!" Compromise is the only 
sane attitude. The world is not, will never be, 
to the strong of arm or spirit, as Nietzsche be- 
lieves. The race is to the mediocre. The sur- 
vival of the fittest means survival of the weakest. 
Society shields and upholds the feeble. Mediocrity 
rules, let Carlyle or Nietzsche thunder to the 
contrary. It was the perception of these facts 
that drove Stirner to formulate his theories in 
The Ego and His Own. He was poor, a failure, 
and despised by his wife. He lived under a dull, 
brutal regime. The Individual was naught, the 
369 



EGOISTS 

State all. His book was his great revenge. It 
was the efflorescence of his Ego. It was his 
romance, his dream of an ideal world, his Platonic 
republic. Philosophy is more a matter of man's 
temperament than some suppose. And philoso- 
phers often live by opposites. Schopenhauer 
preached asceticism, but hardly led an ascetic 
life; Nietzsche's injunctions to become Immoral- 
ists and Supermen were but the buttressing up 
of a will diseased, by the needs of a man who 
suffered his life long from morbid sensibility. 
James Walker's suggestion that "We will not al- 
low the world to wait for the Superman. We are 
the Supermen," is a convincing criticism of Nietz- 
scheism. I am Unique. Never again will this 
aggregation of atoms stand on earth. Therefore 
I must be free. I will myself free. (It is spiritual 
liberty that only counts.) But my I must not be 
of the kind described by the madhouse doctor in 
Peer Gynt: "Each one shuts himself up in the 
barrel of self. In the self-fermentation he dives 
to the bottom; with the self -bung he seals it 
hermetically." The increased self -responsibil- 
ity of life in an Egoist Union would prevent the 
world from ever entering into such ideal anarchy 
(an-arch, i.e., without government). There is too 
much of renunciation in the absolute freedom of 
the will — that is its final, if paradoxical, impli- 
cation — for mankind. Our Utopias are secretly 
based on Chance. Deny Chance in our existence 
and life would be without salt. Man is not a per- 
fectible animal; not on this side of eternity. 

37° 



MAX STIRNER 

He fears the new and therefore clings to his old 
beliefs. To each his own chimera. He has not 
grown mentally or physically since the Sumerians 
— or a million years before the Sumerians. The 
squirrel in the revolving cage thinks it is progres- 
sing; Man is in a revolving cage. He goes round 
but he does not progress. Man is not a logical 
animal. He is governed by his emotions, his 
affective life. He lives by his illusions. His brains 
are an accident, possibly from overnutrition as 
De Gourmont has declared. To fancy him cap- 
able of existing in a community where all will be 
selfgoverned is a poet's vision. That way the 
millennium lies, or the High Noon of Nietzsche. 
And would the world be happier if it ever did 
attain this condition? 

The English translation of The Ego and His 
Own, by Stephen T. Byington, is admirable; it 
is that of a philologist and a versatile scholar. 
Stirner's form is open to criticism. It is vermic- 
ular. His thought is sometimes confused; he 
sees so many sides of his theme, embroiders it 
with so many variations, that he repeats himself. 
He has neither the crystalline brilliance nor the 
poetic glamour of Nietzsche. But he left behind 
him a veritable breviary of destruction, a strik- 
ing and dangerous book. It is dangerous in 
every sense of the word — to socialism, to poli- 
ticians, to hypocrisy. It asserts the dignity of the 
Individual, not his debasement. 

"Is it not the chief disgrace in the w r orld not 
to be a unit; to be reckoned one character; not 

37 1 



EGOISTS 

to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was 
created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, 
in the hundred of thousands, of the party, of the 
section to which we belong, and our opinion 
predicted geographically as the North or the 
South ?" 

Herbert Spencer did not write these words, 
nor Max Stirner. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote 
them. 



372 



BOOKS BY JAMES -HUNEKER 



EGOISTS: 

A Book of Supermen 

STENDHAL, BAUDELAIRE, FLAUBERT, ANATOLE 

FRANCE, HUYSMANS, BARRES, HELLO, BLAKE, 

NIETZSCHE, IBSEN, and MAX STIRNER 

WITH PORTRAIT AND FACSIMILE 
RETROD UCTIONS 

i2mo. $1.50 net 

This new book by James Huneker, the first in more 
than three years, is wholly devoted to those modern poets, 
philosophers and prose masters whose writings embody 
the individualistic idea as opposed to altruistic and social- 
istic sentiments. Amply discussed are Stendhal, whose 
cult, recently revived on the Continent, is steadily growing ; 
Maurice Barres, French Academician ; Anatole France, 
blithe pagan and delicious ironist; Max Stirner, the fore- 
runner of Nietzsche; the mystics, Ernest Hello — new to 
American readers — and William Blake. Much new his- 
torical material may be found in the studies of Charles 
Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert. A hitherto unpublished 
letter of the novelist, together with an original page proof 
of "Madame Bovary," corrected by his own hand, will 
prove of interest to his admirers. That brilliant virtuoso 
of the French language, J. K. Huysmans, forms the sub- 
ject of a chapter, while certain phases of Nietzsche, in- 
cluding his newly published biography, " Ecce Homo," 
and the Ibsen dramas, are also subjects of discussion. 
Altogether the book represents the most mature critical 
and analytical thought of the author applied to some of 
the most interesting literary personages in modern 
Europe. 



BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER 

ICONOCLASTS: 

A Book of Dramatists 

i2mo. $1.50 net 

Contents: Henrik Ibsen — August Strindberg — Henry Becque — 
Gerhart Hauptmann — Paul Hervieu — The Quintessence of 
Shaw — Maxim Gorky's Nachtasyl — Hermann Sudermann — 
Princess Mathilde's Play — Duse and D'Annunzio — Villiers de 
l'lsle Adam — Maurice Maeterlinck. 

"His style is a little jerky, but it is one of those rare styles in which 
we are led to expect some significance, if not wit, in every sentence." 
— G. K. Chesterton, in London Daily News. 

"No other book in English has surveyed the whole field so com- 
prehensively." — The Outlook. 

"A capital book, lively, informing, suggestive." 

— London Times Saturday Review. 

"Eye-opening and mind-clarifying is Mr. Huneker's criticism; 
. . . no one having read that opening essay in this volume 
will lay it down until the final judgment upon Maurice Maeterlinck 
is reached." — Boston Transcript. 



OVERTONES: 

A Book of Temperaments 

WITH FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT OF 
RICHARD STRAUSS 

i2mo. $1.25 net 

Contents: Richard Strauss — Parsifal: A Mystical Melodrama — 
Literary Men who loved Music (Balzac, Turgenieff, Daudet, 
etc.) — The Eternal Feminine — The Beethoven of French Prose 
— Nietzsche the Rhapsodist — Anarchs of Art — After Wagner, 
What?— Verdi and Boito. 

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edge, its catholicity of taste, and its inexhaustible energy." 

— Saturday Review, London. 

"In some respects Mr. Huneker must be reckoned the most 
brilliant of all living writers on matters musical." — Academy, London. 

"No modern musical critic has shown greater ingenuity in the 
attempt to correlate the literary and musical tendencies of the nine- 
teenth century." — Spectator, London. 



BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER 

MEZZOTINTS IN 
MODERN MUSIC 

BRAHMS, TSCHAIKOWSKY, CHOPIN, 

RICHARD STRAUSS, LISZT 

AND WAGNER 

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as possible ; or he sketches the composers in fine, broad, sweeping 
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as Mr. Huneker is, as I have said, a powerful personality, a man of 
quick brain and an energetic imagination, a man of moods and tem- 
perament — a string that vibrates and sings in response to music — 
we get in these essays of his a distinctly original and very valuable 
contribution to the world's tiny musical literature." 

— J. F. Runclman, in London Saturday Review. 



MELOMANIACS 

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Contents: The Lord's Prayer in B — A Son of Liszt — A Chopin 
of the Gutter — The Piper of Dreams — An Emotional Acrobat 
— Isolde's Mother — The Rim of Finer Issues — An Ibsen Girl — 
Tannhauser's Choice — The Red-Headed Piano Player — Bryn- 
hild's Immolation — The Quest of the Elusive — An involuntary 
Insurgent — Hunding's Wife — The Corridor of Time — Avatar 
— The Wegstaffes give a Musicale — The Iron Virgin — Dusk 
of the Gods — Siegfried's Death — Intermezzo — A Spinner of 
Silence — The Disenchanted Symphony — Music the Conqueror. 

"It would be difficult to sum up ' Melomaniacs ' in a phrase. 
Never did a book, in my opinion at any rate, exhibit greater con- 
trasts, not, perhaps, of strength and weakness, but of clearness and 
obscurity. It is inexplicably uneven, as if the writer were perpetu- 
ally playing on the boundary line that divides sanity of thought from 
intellectual chaos. There is method in the madness, but it is a 
method of intangible ideas. Nevertheless, there is genius written 
over a large portion of it, and to a musician the wealth of musical 
imagination is a living spring of thought." 

— Harold E. Gorst, in London Saturday Review (Dec. 8, 1906). 



BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER 



VISIONARIES 

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Contents: A Master of Cobwebs — The Eighth Deadly Sin — The 
Purse of Aholibah — Rebels of the Moon — The Spiral Road — 
A Mock Sun— Antichrist— The Eternal Duel— The Enchanted 
Yodler — The Third Kingdom — The Haunted Harpsichord — 
The Tragic Wall— A Sentimental Rebellion— Hall of the Miss- 
ing Footsteps — The Cursory Light — An Iron Fan — The Woman 
Who Loved Chopin — The Tune of Time — Nada — Pan. 

"The author's style is sometimes grotesque in its desire both to 
startle and to find true expression. He has not followed those great 
novelists who write French a child may read and understand. He 
calls the moon 'a spiritual gray wafer'; it faints in 'a red wind'; 
'truth beats at the bars of a man's bosom'; the sun is 'a sulphur- 
colored cymbal'; a man moves with 'the jaunty grace of a young 
elephant.' But even these oddities are significant and to be placed 
high above the slipshod sequences of words that have done duty 
till they are as meaningless as the imprint on a worn-out coin. 

"Besides, in nearly every story the reader is arrested by the idea, 
and only a little troubled now and then by an over-elaborate style. 
If most of us are sane, the ideas cherished by these visionaries are 
insane; but the imagination of the author so illuminates them that 
we follow wondering and spellbound. In 'The Spiral Road' and 
in some of the other stories both fantasy and narrative may be com- 
pared with Hawthorne in his most unearthly moods. The younger 
man has read his Nietzsche and has cast off his heritage of simple 
morals. Hawthorne's Puritanism rinds no echo in these modern 
souls, all sceptical, wavering and unblessed. But Hawthorne's 
splendor of vision and his power of sympathy with a tormented 
mind do live again in the best of Mr. Huneker's stories." 

— London Academy (Feb. 3, 1906). 



CHOPIN: 

The Man and His Music 

WITH ETCHED PORTRAIT 

i2mo. $2.00 

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his pages without a deeper appreciation of the new forms of beauty 
which Chopin has added, like so many species of orchids, to the 
musical flora of the nineteenth century." — The Nation. 

"I think it not too much to predict that Mr. Huneker's estimate 
of Chopin and his works is destined to be the permanent one. _ He 
gives the reader the cream of the cream of all noteworthy previous 
commentators, besides much that is wholly his own. He speaks at 
once with modesty and authority, always with personal charm." 

— Boston Transcript. 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, NEW YORK 









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